Since 1986, Canada has been offering Permanent residency to various rich investors from various countries under Investor Immigrant Program. In the beginning these programs were under federal immigration however, late ron many provinces as Quebec also joined the bandwagon
Millions of dollars have been invested in the Canadian economy under these programs.
Is the Investor Immigration program helping Canada grow?
Typically, till the time, skilled worker immigration was open in its earlier form till 2014, any educated well settled person till age of 49 years was eligible to immigrate to Canada under one of the categories and he had no obligation to invest any astronomical sum. Typically this category of immigration was resorted to be persons who were not eligible to immigrate otherwise i.e. not able to meet even simple requirements of being graduate, having four years of experience etc
There is no doubt that this stream of immigration did help Canada grow and lots of money was pumped into its economy. This also helped provide employment opportunities to Canadian Nationals. This money was divided to various provinces to build infrastructure facilities there.
However, some studies have shown that the contribution as being attributed to these immigrants may not be as much as had been attributed to them.
First of all average investor immigrant pays lower rate of taxes. Most of such investors continue with their main business abroad, generally in country of their origin and only their children and spouses live in Canada.
This program is being used or may we say abused to get back door entry to Canada and has in fact led to soaring prices of real estate in major cities of Canada as Vancouver, Toronto, Calgary etc.
In the meanwhile, revised version of this program, the Immigrant Investor Venture Capital Pilot Program, which replaced the old federal investor program, where immigrants were asked to contribute a sum of $2 million as fund, to be given as unsecured investment hardly elicited any response. So far only 17 applications have been received.
As against above, earlier version had backlog of 65000 applications.
Reason is not difficult to guess- In the earlier program only a sum of $800,000 was to be given to the Government without Interest. In contrast, current program asks for much higher sum of money.
At times, though Canada still holds interests for immigrants, giving this high sum does not appear to make sense to potential immigrants, well it is well clear from the response and number of applications received.
Unless, Canadian Government does not ensured fair program which provides conducive environment to business growth, such investment may not be forthcoming easily