The head of the prominent Dutch pension investor Bouwinvest will arrive at the Canada Investment Summit next week with a message: if you want more of our money, please tax us the way you do your own pension funds. After all, the United States does.

“A foreign pension fund fills in some forms, becomes a ‘qualified foreign pension fund’ and is treated in the same way as domestic pension funds, and that’s exactly what we’re looking for between Canada and the Netherlands,” said Mark Siezen, the CEO of the investment manager that handles about €18.5 billion in Dutch savings.

That would mean not taxing profits on Canadian real estate investments, because those proceeds will be taxed as income when they’re paid out to retirees. Instead, he told The Logic, Canada taxes foreign pension investors like other private corporations.

“It adds a 25 per cent tax onto any investment you do,” said Siezen. The U.S. exemption is focused on real estate, but that’s Bouwinvest’s business.

The policy is not uniquely Canadian, he stressed; indeed, it’s commonplace. The Netherlands does the same to Canadian pension investments, and Siezen includes other western European nations, along with Australia, Japan and South Korea, on his list of those that should treat each other’s pension funds like their own.

“With the increased urgency of—let’s call it the ‘middle countries’—to solidify ties and get more money flowing between them, this is at the top of the agenda,” Siezen said, echoing the language Prime Minister Mark Carney used to rally those countries against great-power bullies last winter.

Though he’s spent his adulthood in the Netherlands and manages a Dutch pension investor, Siezen was raised in Australia and the United States—his accent in English is a mix of long Aussie vowels and clipped Dutch delivery. His father grew up in Toronto.

Bouwinvest is keen on the Canadian market, attracted by its stability and the fundamentals of its real estate sector, and already has a handful of holdings here. On those, it either accepts the tax hit, in the case of an exceptional opportunity, or finds ways to structure deals with Canadian partners to get around it. That’s not ideal, Siezen said.

“You don’t want it to be down to the fiscal geniuses to figure it out. It just needs to be an investment highway as opposed to an investment mountain-goat track,” he said.

Siezen has banged this drum in Canada before, including in meetings with federal deputy ministers. Through an access-to-information request, The Logic obtained a copy of a briefing note preparing Paul Halucha, the deputy minister of housing and infrastructure, for one of those in June.

“Currently, Dutch/EU pension funds face double taxation in Canada, resulting in most of their

North American investment going to the United States,” the note acknowledged.

Halucha ought to ask Siezen what might get institutional investors to fund new housing construction over buying ownership stakes in completed projects, it said. The Logic put that question to him.

Bouwinvest sees adding supply to a tight housing market as a social good and wants to do that where it can, Siezen said. “New builds” tend to be riskier than existing stock, though, and have to come with higher returns.

It follows that a tax system that suppresses returns makes those riskier investments less appealing.

Siezen came out of his June meetings in Ottawa encouraged about the prospects for reforms, though he said Thursday that he’s not aware that anything much has happened since.

“From the business side of things, you know, you’ve done your advocacy. You’ve made the point, and it’s in the hands of the finance departments in the two countries to make it work,” he said.

A spokesperson for Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne did not respond by deadline to a question about whether Champagne agrees this is a problem and, if so, whether he’s doing anything to address it. 

The list of investment opportunities Canada is pitching to foreign investors at next week’s summit has no housing projects among its 167 entries. Siezen said that doesn’t trouble him; he has meetings booked with movers and shakers, including Housing Minister Gregor Robertson, and he understands that big infrastructure is higher on Canada’s priority list. 

But there’s something that all the potential dams and pipelines and port terminals and data centres that are in the deal book have in common.

“To be able to do all these other investments, whether it’s into resources or infrastructure or whatever, you’re going to need affordable housing for your workers and for your population,” Siezen said. “It’s almost like hygiene, behind all the other stuff.”