CANADA’S immigration minister has rejected the notion that tens of thousands of millionaire investor migrants, mostly Chinese, who converged on Vancouver in recent years were linked to the city’s sky-high property market.

    In an interview with the South China Morning Post, Chris Alexander said the government had had “absolutely no concern” about the impact of the Immigrant Investor Program on the westcoast city’s housing prices.

    The 28-year-old visa scheme, which had a backlog of 65,000 applicants, was axed by Canada last week.

    The dumped applications will include those of an estimated 45,500 mainland Chinese queuing via Hong Kong, of whom 80 percent were bound for British Columbia, according to the Post’s analysis of immigration department data. The axing of the scheme has led to fears that it could shake the housing market in Vancouver, where 96 percent of recent Chinese immigrants to BC settle.

    Housing in Vancouver is rated the second most unaffordable in the world, behind Hong Kong.

    “We look at all factors but there was absolutely no concern,” Alexander said Feb. 12, when asked whether the government believed the axed scheme had boosted property prices in Vancouver. “We have only been admitting 5,000 or so people under this program and our entrepreneur program in recent years. These represented … less than 2 percent of overall immigration.”

    However when asked to clarify if he believed rich migrants played any role in the housing market, he demurred.

    “It would be wrong to identify those trends with the Immigrant Investor Program, which has been responsible for a decreasing share of our overall immigration, and which wasn’t even necessarily bringing people into Canada.”

    Alexander was referring to the government’s assessment that many investor migrants simply return to their former countries to continue working. He said the decision to axe the scheme was based largely on economic grounds.

    “The tax returns, the declared tax returns under this program were less than for our other economic programs,” he said.

    Under the scheme, principal applicants worth a minimum of C$1.6 million (US$1.46 million) would receive residency visas for their family in exchange for loaning the government C$800,000 interest free for a period of five years, after which the entire loan was returned.

    About 40,000 investor migrants have arrived in BC in the past eight years, of whom two-thirds were mainlanders. Including Hongkongers and Taiwanese, the proportion rises above 80 percent.

    (SD-Agencies)