Can I file a section 216 election every year, or does it lock me in permanently?

A section 216 election is made on a year-by-year basis, not as a one-time, permanent choice that automatically applies to every future year once you've filed it once. Each taxation year in which you earned Canadian rental income as a non-resident, you, or your agent, generally need to file the return supporting the election again for that year, rather than assuming an earlier year's filing carries forward on its own.

This matters practically because the withholding on your gross rent through the year keeps happening under the default rules unless you've also arranged, through a separate mechanism, to have withholding reduced to reflect expected net income during the year itself — filing the election after the fact reconciles what you actually owed, but doesn't change how withholding was applied while the year was in progress unless that separate step was also taken.

Because the obligation resets every year, non-resident landlords who plan to keep the property for the long term should treat the section 216 filing as a recurring annual task tied to their Canadian rental income, building it into their regular routine rather than treating it as something they dealt with once and can forget about.