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The Hongcouver | Under new rules, rich Chinese should learn French if they want to move to Canada
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Ian Youngin Vancouver
Residents of Vancouver would be advised to keep an eye (and ear) out for a wave of French-speaking Chinese millionaires.
That’s because of a possible loophole in attempts to rein in wealth-based migration to Canada: an exemption that theoretically allows unlimited numbers of rich migrants into the country so long as they can demonstrate an ability to speak French.
French-speaking or not, the vast majority of millionaire investor immigrants to Canada have previously been Chinese. So will the francophone exemption trigger boom times for French teachers in China?
The parallel immigration system run by the province of Quebec has long bedevilled attempts to reform Canada’s immigration system. As part of the 1991 Canada-Quebec accord, the province has been allowed to select its own immigrants, even if visas are ultimately issued by federal authorities. Ostensibly, this has been to protect the province’s francophone nature from dilution.
But in practice, it allowed thousands of non-francophone Chinese millionaires to get into Canada via Quebec, sidestepping a huge queue for the federal immigrant investor programme (under which immigrants worth a minimum of C$1.6million gained residency in exchange for loaning the government C$800,000 interest free for five years; in Quebec’s case the loan went entirely to the province). Canada’s Conservative government announced that it was shutting down the federal version of the scheme in February, dumping about 65,000 would-be immigrants from the queue. But Quebec’s scheme continues to operate.
To prevent the huge backlog from simply switching to Quebec’s parallel scheme, an annual cap of 1,750 applications was announced, including a maximum of 1,200 of any one nationality.
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