Auditor general wading into immigrant investor fund

As P.E.I.'s public accounts committee squabbled over whether it should investigate a program that raised business investment funds from immigrants on Tuesday, the province's auditor general said he would examine the matter.

Colin Younker said that his office would begin looking into the program, noting there were significant amounts of money involved. The public accounts committee will meet again next week, and the provincial nominee program will be on the agenda.

'What we're getting is a black mark put on MLAs here.' — PC MLA Jim Bagnall

When Progressive Conservative MLAs raised the question at the committee, some government MLAs said they should wait, because RCMP are currently investigating a complaint of fraud from a shareholder in one of the dozens of companies involved.

"We have an opportunity right now to take the initiative and move this forward as a committee," responded PC MLA Jim Bagnall.

"What we're getting is a black mark put on MLAs here … the story will go out that this committee put a blanket on this issue because they didn't want to deal with it and I think this is an issue we should be dealing with."

On Friday, Progressive Conservative MLAs challenged their Liberal counterparts to reveal which of them own businesses that received money from the provincial nominee program for immigrants.

The program, which ended Sept. 2, took in a huge amount of money in the five months before it was shut down. While the program typically involved a few hundred immigrants every year since it launched around 2001, 2,000 were approved by the province between April 1 and Sept. 2.

A $400-million question

Each of those potential immigrants had to put up $200,000 for investment in the province to qualify. In those last five months that created a $400-million fund, equal to about one-third of P.E.I.'s annual budget.

Innovation Minister Richard Brown acknowledges some Liberal MLAs have companies with some of that money invested in them, but would not identify them. He did say all the cases were reviewed and cleared by the conflict of interest commissioner, who ruled that all the transactions were by private investors in private companies.

While the investments were done privately through an agent, all the companies eligible for the program had to be approved by the provincial government.

While the immigrants are not yet on the Island, the money is. Citizenship and Immigration Canada has expressed concern about the quality of the investments made and whether the potential immigrants will be able to get their money back. The federal agency still has to do health and security checks on the applicants, and estimates it could take five to 10 years to clear the 2,000 cases.