Citizenship and Immigration Canada numbers indicate that investor immigrant approvals in Canada for investors from Hong Kong and Mainland China declined by 13.6% between 2013 and 2014, with 5,116 approved investor migrants in 2014, the lowest since 2007. The data, courtesy of the South China Morning Post, shows that the majority – 3,284 – of these investors entered Canada through the province of Quebec’s immigrant investor program, which saw a 41.0% increase in approvals between the two years, but was still below 2008’s record 4,183 approvals.
The Citizenship and Immigration Canada data indicates that Canada-wide, 64,472 investor migrants from Hong Kong and Mainland China were approved between 2002 and 2014, of which 42,207 were approved under Quebec’s immigrant investor programme. Canadian and Quebecois offices both approved zero migrants through their Taipei office in 2014, while the Asia-Pacific region overall had 5,882 approvals across Canada, 3,893 of which were approved by Quebec. Of the 8,762 investor migrants from any part of the world who were approved by any Canadian office in 2014, 6,221 were due to Quebec’s program.
In 2014, approvals in Hong Kong vastly outnumbered approvals in Beijing, with 5,105 and 11 Canada-wide approvals respectively, or 3,277 and 7 Quebec approvals respectively. This Hong Kong-Quebec channel thus makes up some 55.7% of 2014’s entire Asia Pacific-Canada flow of investor migrants, and 37.4% of the entire global flow to Canada, illustrating the impact of the Hong Kong-Quebec endpoints. Last year, investor migrants to Canada from Africa and the Middle East numbered 1,783; from Europe, 781; and from the Americas, 261.
As the South China Morning Post reported last week, Canada’s Immigrant Investor Program was ended last year, with the new Immigrant Investor Venture Capital Pilot Program opening on January 28. While the Canadian government expected 500 applications within two weeks, the new scheme had received just six applications as of June 8, 2015.