Rich Chinese immigrants' deception costs British Columbia billions

Most of the 30,000 rich Chinese who have recently moved to British Columbia told authorities they would settle elsewhere in Canada, with the deception costing the province access to billions of dollars in loans.

An investigation by the South China Morning Post revealed the widespread illicit practice, which is demonstrated in a huge discrepancy between approval and arrival numbers of Chinese in BC under the Immigrant Investor Programme (IIP). The Post's revelations come as Ottawa prepares to unveil a wealth migration scheme to replace the federal IIP, which was axed in June.

The huge influx of rich Chinese is already a hotly debated issue in Vancouver, which has seen property prices soar.

From 2005 to 2012, a total of 29,764 rich Chinese, mostly from the mainland but also from Taiwan and Hong Kong, are known to have moved to BC under the programme, which required applicants to loan Canada C$800,000 (HK$5.54 million) per family and have minimum assets of C$1.6 million. Yet in the same period, only 13,872 certificates of permanent residency were issued to applicants from greater China who nominated BC as their intended destination.

This suggests at least 53 per cent of all Chinese known to have settled in BC under the IIP said they planned to live elsewhere. Immigration experts said this was mainly done to secure preferential treatment - for instance, by applying via Quebec's independently run IIP to bypass the queue for the now-defunct federal version of the scheme.

Because the IIP's loan funds are disbursed to the provinces according to the stated destination of migrants, the deception has cost BC access to about C$2 billion in interest-free five-year loans, the Post calculates.

Among mainland Chinese, at least 60.3 per cent of arrivals in BC practised the apparent deception. And because mainland Chinese dominated the IIP, they represented 86.8 per cent of all apparent deceivers.