Is Trump’s Gold Card policy a lost opportunity for Canada?

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United States President Donald Trump’s plan to attract foreign investors by selling Gold Cards for US$5 million is light on details, but the program is expected to let rich foreigners get a residency permit and an easier route to becoming a U.S. citizen.

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The Trump administration hopes the money raised by the program can help pay down the country’s US$35-trillion debt and also boost investments.

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“The people that can pay US$5 million, they’re going to create jobs,” Trump said at a press conference in late February. “They’re going to spend a lot of money on jobs. They’re going to have to pay taxes on that too. I happen to think it’s going to sell like crazy.”

Canada ran a federal investor immigration program, which was a lot cheaper than Trump’s Gold Card proposal, for many years before it was cancelled in 2014. With Trump’s announcement last month, some Canadian immigration lawyers feel that Ottawa may be missing out on a similar opportunity.

Here’s how the Gold Card could work and whether Canada could follow suit.

What is Trump proposing?

Trump has said his administration will allow foreigners to live in the U.S. and provide them with a route to citizenship if they buy a Gold Card for US$5 billion.

“They’ll be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people, and we think it’s going to be extremely successful,” he said at a press conference last month.

The timeline and conditions to apply for a Gold Card aren’t clear yet, but it is expected to replace an existing program that already provides residency permits to rich foreign investors in the U.S.

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Under the EB-5 program, a person can become a permanent resident in the U.S. if they spend about US$800,000 to a bit more than US$1 million — depending on the category — on a commercial enterprise and create at least 10 permanent full-time jobs for American workers.

U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said projects under this program didn’t “really work out” due to a lack of oversight. They were “poorly overseen, poorly executed,” he said at a press conference in February, adding that he expects the Gold Card to be better than the existing program.

Can it help pay down U.S. debt?

Lutnick said there are currently about 250,000 applicants in line for the EB-5 and that the U.S. could earn around US$1 trillion if at least 200,000 members of this group take up the upcoming Gold Card offer. This can help “pay down our debt and that’s why the president is doing this,” he said.

Trump went a step further at the same press conference and said it was possible to sell up to 10 million of these cards, so the U.S. could earn US$50 trillion and completely pay off its debt.

He also didn’t rule out allowing Russian oligarchs to buy the cards: “I know some Russian oligarchs that are very nice people,” he said when asked about the possibility.

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Finding millions of potential takers will be easier said than done, immigration lawyers say.

“He is dreaming,” Vance Langford, co-president of the Calgary-based Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association (CILA), said. “With Trump, you know he’ll make a big announcement with very little detail, then find out it won’t work and have to backtrack.”

He said Trump’s proposal is relatively unattractive compared to some of the other investor programs out there. For example, an investor can become a citizen of a European Union country in 18 months for one million euros and then get access to 27 countries and visa-free travel to the U.S.

But Stephen Green, a managing partner at Toronto-based Green and Spiegel LLP, doesn’t think the proposal is unrealistic.

“If you look around the world now, there are enough ‘Plan B’ people around the world to fill this quota,” he said.

He said he hopes Canada can come up with a similar policy.

Is Canada missing out?

While US$5 million may seem expensive, some experts say Canada should explore the possibility of starting an immigration program that brings in high-net-worth individuals by charging them somewhere between $1 million and $2 million.

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“We could ask for $1.5 to $2 million. We could create an infrastructure fund that could use this money to help Northern communities that need water treatment, hospitals, schools,” Green said. “Our infrastructure is falling down across the country. We should have a pilot project to bring in maybe 500 families one year and see how it goes.”

But immigrant investor programs such as the one Trump announced don’t always pan out as expected. Canada had a Federal Immigrant Investor Program for many years before shutting it down in 2014, citing lower economic contribution from those newcomers in the long run compared to skilled immigrants entering the country through other programs.

At the federal level, Canada ran an immigrant investor program from 1986 to 2014. Prior to it being shut down, applicants needed to have a net worth of at least $1.6 million and invest $800,000 over five years.

However, the program was shut down in 2014 because most immigrant investors were not making a “long-term positive economic contribution to Canada,” the federal government said in a statement back then.

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“Over a 20-year career, an immigrant investor pays about $200,000 less in income taxes than a federal skilled worker and almost $100,000 less in taxes than one live-in caregiver, “the statement said.

Such investors also had the lowest official language ability among any immigrant category, including refugees, according to a survey conducted back then.

Some immigration lawyers say that cancelling the program didn’t make sense and that several countries across the world still run such programs.

Green said the Canada Revenue Agency should have gone after any immigrants who were paying lower-than-expected taxes. Cancelling the whole program and ending the funding benefits shouldn’t have been the solution.

Authorities seemed to be more concerned about the negative sentiment surrounding people being able to buy their way into Canada, he said, an idea he finds nothing wrong with since the millions of dollars they brought with them helped develop Canada’s infrastructure.

“What’s the difference between that and bringing in foreign students and charging them $50,000 a year?” he said.

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Not having an investor immigrant program also means Canada is missing out on entrepreneurs looking to leave the U.S. due to a change in the political environment.

Langford said the number of people calling him to move their businesses to Canada from the U.S. has increased by 500 per cent.

“I used to get one call a week, and now I get five,” he said.

Langford is currently working with a gay couple in the U.S. to move their businesses to Canada. Since there isn’t a straightforward program to do that, he is creating a company for them in Canada and obtaining work permits for them under the country’s international mobility program as intracompany transferees.

“This is a valid means to bring foreign talent and investment to Canada, but there should be a dedicated program for investors,” he said.

He said Canada could have attracted many more high-net-worth individuals if it had federal and provincial programs specifically to do that.

Could Canada start a new investor immigration program?

A year after the federal government shut down its immigrant investor program in 2014, it tested a new program that would charge applicants twice as much money.

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Applicants under this pilot program would have to have a net worth of $10 million and invest $2 million over 15 years. But the pilot program didn’t receive much demand and was shut down within the year.

Siavash Shekarian, chair of business immigration at CILA, blames the poor response on decision-making.

“Frankly, we were so lazy in providing the necessary oversight and monitoring that is required for a functioning program,” he said.

He criticized the government’s decision to drastically increase the financial requirements for the pilot program in 2015 overnight, and said that policy was “made by authorities behind closed doors without any knowledge of what was happening on the ground.”

Shekarian said the global market for immigration investor programs is worth $80 billion and countries are taking advantage of this. As an example, the United Arab Emirates issued 250,000 golden visas in 2023.

Canada doesn’t have an investor immigration program at the federal level, but it does have one in Quebec, which is allowed to follow its own immigration policies. But even that program is stalled and “practically unworkable” because of the high language requirements, he said.

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With Trump launching his Gold Card policy, Shekarian and other immigration lawyers believe now is the right time for Canada to launch something similar.

But there is one very important condition: “You gotta do it right. If you do it the way it has been done, you’re just creating a disaster,” he said.

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada said in a statement last week that there are no plans at this time to reintroduce a new immigrant investor program.

• Email: nkarim@postmedia.com

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