The Hongcouver | Blame Quebec: Why halting the immigrant investor programme hasn’t halted flow of immigrant investors to Vancouver
Demise of the federal IIP might only reduce arrivals of rich immigrants in BC by about a third
One of the biggest questions among Vancouver real estate types for 2014 was this: Why hasn’t the cancellation of the Chinese-dominated immigrant investor programme halted price rises at the top end of the market yet?
But a better question would be this: Why hasn’t the cancellation of the immigrant investor programme halted the flow of investor immigrants to Vancouver yet?
It might surprise some to discover that in spite of the announcement more than 10 months ago that the federal IIP was being scrapped, rich immigrants continue to arrive in Vancouver under the defunct scheme to this day, and likely will continue to do so for several months.
That’s because would-be immigrants generally get one year in which to activate their permanent residency from the time they undergo their mandatory medical checks. Not only that, some of the approved immigrant investors hadn’t had those medical exams at the time the government announced the February 11, 2014, cancellation of the programme and suspended most of its assessments. So their arrival will potentially drag on beyond that date in 2015.
On top of these, according to Citizenship and Immigration Canada, there are a “small number of cases where a selection decision [approval] was made on or after February 11, 2014 … and a final decision was made before Bill C-31 became law [on June 19, 2014]. Those applications are not affected by the legislation.”
So the tap has been turned off, but there’s still some water in the hose. An immigration industry source told me he expects the last dribble of federal investor immigrants to have arrived by summer 2015.
There’s a second, much larger, consideration - many investor immigrants will continue to arrive in Vancouver every year for the foreseeable future, after deceptively applying to immigrate to Quebec under that province’s still-operational version of the IIP. How many? Probably equivalent to a majority of BC’s previous annual arrivals.