| First, please don't use fixed-width font to quote -- it makes users have to scroll horizontally to see it all. Second, I'm not a lawyer either, but it seems as a Canadian property investor, you could make your case with several items in the above list: (f) an interest in an enterprise that entitles the owner to share in the income or profits of the enterprise; (g) an interest in an enterprise that entitles the owner to share in the assets of that enterprise on dissolution; Both of those items might be satisfied by having a shell corporation buy the property for the human buyer, who's invested the necessary funds in the corporation. Furthermore, I don't see how your objection about "property" unqualified referring to chattel could withstand this, which is probably very easy to argue for as long as the buyer rents out the property: (j) any other tangible or intangible, moveable or immovable, property and related property rights acquired or used for business purposes; |
You're right that you could use (f) and (g) to sidestep, but an interest in an enterprise is something resembling equity. So yeah, set up a domestic shell corp, capitalize it, put your real estate in it, and that's probably good to go - I'm generalizing, but you're right. But being able to structure around a particular tax is not the same as the particular tax not applying or not existing. If for whatever Canadian legal reasons liability pierces the entity and goes back to the principals, you have a tax problem. I'm sure there are ways to structure around that as well, but again, I'm way out of my element on Canadian law.
As for (j) that's going to depend on whether Canadian law interprets "immovable property" as real property or not, and then what constitutes business purposes. I'll venture a guess that if a foreigner buys a home, assuming immovable property = real property for (j), and rents it out at market rates at arms length, that's okay. Buying it so their kids can live in it, or "renting" it to relatives or anything other than market rate and arms-length is probably less okay.
I also don't know enough about Canadian jurisprudence and the propensity to enforce the spirit of a law rather than the black letter. So basically I'm a dog pretending to be a Canadian lawyer on the internet. But those are the issues to me. It's certainly arguable from both positions.