The Hongcouver | Can Canada’s immigration industry bring federal millionaire migration scheme back from the dead?
The Conference Board of Canada has issued a report that recommends a new immigrant investor program - and says concerns about real estate prices in Vancouver must be ‘placated’
Few mourned when Canada’s federal immigrant investor program met its demise (1986-2014), crushed to death under the weight of endemic tax cheating, a vast backlog of applicants and the dubious ethics and temptations involved in selling residency.
Few, that is, outside the immigration industry.
For years the federal IIP had been a spectacular money-spinner - although not necessarily for the Canadian economy.
“Lucrative” doesn’t cover it: commissions of C$100,000 or more were being paid to “facilitators” for every successful referral of an immigrant to the IIP. Up to C$40,000 of that came from provincial investment funds receiving the applicants’ C$800,000 IIP investments; the rest was generally topped up by banks that provided financing for applicants.
Why so much, when the popular scheme was heavily over-subscribed? Consultants in the Chinese market, which provided the bulk of all applicants, were colluding to “fix” the commissions, raising concern that the practice would “incentivise fraud”, according to an internal Citizenship and Immigration Canada memo describing the payments. “Non-competitive pricing practices, particularly in the Chinese market, have the potential to result in the payment of substantially higher fees to third parties offshore,” the memo noted.