It's just racism, plain and simple. The media ran breathless pearl-clutching stories about how lots of Vancouver's real estate was owned by Chinese investors basically parking money overseas by buying properties and leaving them empty. This was then extrapolated over to Toronto.

The reason the foreign aspect is underlined is because of how dominant the idea of white replacement is in the housing discourse here. If you ask anyone who isn't Marxist about the housing crisis, you'll get two responses: it's either foreign investors buying all the properties and hoarding it so Canadians can't access it, or the Liberals/Trudeau "bringing in" a tens or hundreds of thousands of immigrants to Canada when we have "no room" (ignoring that half the country is literally empty). People here don't believe investors are the problem - just that the wrong investors are trying to ruin things.