Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s ban on foreign homebuyers is making it harder to build new housing, Canadian developers say.

The wording of the ban, which came into effect at the beginning of this year, unintentionally prevents a broad swath of companies from purchasing vacant land to turn into new housing due to its strict limits on foreign involvement, they say. That’s making it harder for the Trudeau government to ease the country’s housing crisis — the reason the prohibition was introduced in the first place.

Some developers in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, have already called off plans to buy land and build new housing for fear they’ll be contravening the ban, according to David Wilkes, chief executive officer of the Building Industry and Land Development Association, an industry trade body.

“I can’t believe the intention was to limit supply,” he said. “People just don’t believe that this could be happening.”

The Trudeau government’s foreign buyers ban was announced last April as part of a sweeping package of policies to rein in some of the most unaffordable housing costs in the world. The centerpiece of the plan was a promise to double the pace of new home construction to 400,000 units annually over the next 10 years.

Now that it’s in place, though, developers say the definitions contained in the act’s fine print, or regulations, will hamper the construction of new homes. The act defines residential property not only as completed units, but also as land without any habitable dwellings, so long as it is located in a large population center and zoned for residential use, according to an analysis by Toronto law firm Robins Appleby. And its definition of non-Canadians includes any corporation with more than 3 per cent foreign ownership.

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