The Hongcouver | Odd bedfellows: As Canada heads to polls, who agrees that offshore money helps fuel Vancouver’s housing market?

It was under Kenney as immigration minister that the federal government decided to shut down the Immigrant Investor Program, a scheme which (in conjunction with Quebec’s still-running IIP) brought tens of thousands of rich, mostly Chinese, homebuyers to Vancouver. By the time the shut-down was implemented last year, Kenney had moved on from the immigration portfolio, but he remains justifiably proud of bringing down this out-of-control scheme, which had a queue of 60,000 at the time of its demise.

On Twitter last month Kenney wrote in an exchange with Vancouver journalists that “the issue revolves around abuse of Investor Immigrant Program, leading to speculative real estate transactions.”

For a mainstream political figure to draw the explicit connection between immigration and the property market is unusual, particularly since Kenney’s leader, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has danced  around the subject by pledging instead to tackle concerns that “foreign, non-resident” buying is the problem for Vancouver.