Study reveals awfulness of Canadian investor immigration; income tax averages C$1,400 per millionaire
British Columbia ends up housing ten times more rich newcomers than Quebec – but Quebec gets ten times more of their ‘investment’ than BC
At last week’s “emergency meeting” on Vancouver housing affordability, local MLA David Eby struck a chord in his opening remarks.
“We have every reason to welcome immigration from China and all over the world; it’s what built British Columbia…but no matter what, extreme wealth should not put you at the front of the line for immigration,” said Eby, of the left-leaning NDP, to long applause.
Many Vancouverites, ethnically Chinese and non-so alike, understand on an instinctive level that selling permanent residency and passports is a Bad Idea. But I doubt many are aware of the precise awfulness of the Immigrant Investor Program (IIP) and the Quebec IIP that have brought tens of thousands of millionaire households to the city for the past 30 years.
In so doing, these schemes have likely driven up real estate prices and unaffordability, research has found.
Yet other resultant economic activity is scant – in fact, investor migrants’ favourite “business” is real estate ownership.
That’s just one finding of a Federal government evaluation of the Chinese-dominated investor schemes, quietly published in October 2014. I can find no reference to the 103-page report in any media; two leading academics who have studied the schemes for years were unware of it before I forwarded it to them this week.
A skinny internal report on immigrant employment earnings, dating from 2012, gave a hint of what many suspected about the investor schemes, whose only real requirement of applicants was a willingness to hand over a pile of cash (latterly, C$800,000) as a five-year loan to Canada. But the latest data is depressingly comprehensive.
No comments:
Post a Comment