The Hongcouver | Millionaire migration to Canada didn't fall after investor scheme's axing - it rose, new data reveals
Quebec investor migrant approvals rapidly accelerated last year, counteracting Ottawa's wind-down of federal IIP, latest immigration statistics show
If you believe Vancouver’s crazy real estate prices have something to do with foreign money, the behaviour of the market in 2014 was a bit of a head scratcher.
It was last year that Ottawa turned off the tap of its millionaire migration scheme, the federal immigrant investor programme (IIP), which has been dominated by rich mainland Chinese. Announced last February, the closure came into effect last summer.
So what did prices do? Fall off a cliff? Not exactly: 2014 was another bumper year, with Metro Vancouver prices up 5.8 per cent, according to the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver’s composite benchmark price. Detached homes, supposedly favoured by rich immigrants, enjoyed an 8.1 per cent increase under this metric.
Naysayers to the foreign-money theory of Vancouver real estate unaffordability probably delight in these facts.
But a new set of data that landed on the Hongcouver blog’s desk this week provides some eye-opening clarification.
Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) spreadsheets demonstrate that, yes, immigrant investor visa approvals under the federal IIP plunged 42 per cent as the scheme wound down, falling to a mere 2,541 applicants and family members in 2014.
