Revive millionaire migration to cure Canada’s coronavirus economic woes, say advocates
- Chinese-dominated investor migration schemes were terminated or paused amid heavy criticism, but supporters are lobbying for their resurrection
- The Investment Industry Association of Canada wants the federal investor programme restarted, but a professor who studied it called it a ‘dismal failure’
Advocates of millionaire migration in Canada are citing the economic impact of Covid-19 as they push to revive the controversial Federal Immigrant Investor Programme.
But the scheme, once dominated by immigrants from Hong Kong and then mainland China, has been linked by critics to housing unaffordability, low tax revenue, fraud and other failings.
In a recent letter to finance minister Bill Morneau, the Investment Industry Association of Canada said it recommended that the federal government “reintroduce a programme to attract foreign direct investment to Canada through a formal immigrant investor programme” as part of coronavirus recovery efforts.
Canada’s immigration department says it has no plan to revive the scheme. But the IIAC letter is part of long-term lobbying by the immigration and investment industries to restart millionaire migration in Canada.
Year after year, declared incomes of business immigrants were puny, typically lower than the incomes of multiply-challenged refugees
The Conference Board of Canada hosted two “Entrepreneur and Investor Immigration Summits” in 2017 and 2018. A report from the second summit concluded “it is incumbent upon federal, provincial and territorial governments to assess how they can better harness the qualities of [high net worth individuals] to help grow the country’s economy”.
The IIAC, a non-profit group that represents registered investment dealers, said a new IIP could “[build] on the strengths of [the previous] Federal Immigrant Investor Programme … one of the most sought-after immigration programmes in the world”.