One of two siblings accused in an immigration fraud case told a Canada Border Services Agency investigator that "everybody knows" immigrants using P.E.I.'s provincial nominee program were using the program as a "bridge" to reach destinations outside the province.

Ping Zhong and her brother Yi were charged in May 2018 with aiding and abetting misrepresentation under the federal Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. But their trial was suspended on Dec. 14, 2018, after just four of ten days set aside for testimony when the Crown called for a stay of proceedings.

The Crown has one year from that date to resume the case. After that, the Crown would have to lay new charges if it wanted to pursue the case.

CBC News argued for and obtained hundreds of pages of court documents filed by the Crown.

Among those documents is a transcript from a marathon, seven-hour interview involving Ping Zhong and CBSA's lead investigator in the case, Lana Hicks. The interview took place Feb. 17, 2016, the day a search warrant was executed at the Sherwood Motel, co-owned by the Zhong siblings.

At one point during the interview Hicks told Zhong that a lot of immigrants coming through P.E.I.'s PNP were not actually living on Prince Edward Island.

Abuse of PNP 'not a secret'

Zhong replied that she had told an official with the PNP the same thing at a Chinese New Year's party.

"I said that so many people, they used it as a bridge to come here because the money is not too expensive and then they go some other places," Zhong told Hicks. "Everybody knows it, right? It's not a secret."

Zhong told Hicks the response from the official was that the province had no control over that.

"We know that some people are not living here, not staying here, but we have no control because of the charter, the charter right or something," Zhong recalled having been told.

The Crown has one year during which it can resume proceedings against the Zhongs. After that, new charges would have to be laid for the case to proceed. (Brian Higgins/CBC)

P.E.I.'s retention rate for PNP immigrants has long been well-below rates in the rest of the country. That's provided a financial windfall for the province, as program participants have walked away from financial deposits they made rather than live and operate a business in P.E.I. From 2007 to 2018 those defaulted deposits contributed $122 million to provincial coffers.

The Zhongs were accused by CBSA of allowing PNP immigrants to use the address of the Sherwood Motel, along with Ping Zhong's home address, to make it look as if they were living in P.E.I. when they were not.

Charter defence

As the Crown pointed out during the trial, all PNP participants have to declare their intention to live in the province that nominated them.

But defence lawyers argued the immigrants were always free to leave, pointing to section six of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which provides permanent residents the right "to move to and take up residence in any province."

Until recently P.E.I. was one of only two remaining provinces whose provincial nominee programs provided permanent resident status to immigrants immediately upon arrival in Canada.

That type of program has drawn criticism from immigration experts and even officials with the federal government, who concluded such programs are "vulnerable to misuse" by participants who "simply see the forfeiture of a deposit as a cost to obtain permanent residence."

In September, the P.E.I. government announced it was taking the lead of most other provinces by requiring PNP participants to live and operate a business in the province for one year before becoming permanent residents.

No contact info

Documents from the Zhong trial also convey the impression P.E.I. was not able to keep track of the whereabouts of immigrants the province had sponsored.

Eleven emails from six different case files were sent by the province to a PNP intermediary to advise that a program participant's deposit was about to be forfeited. The emails were sent after the immigrants had been in Canada for one year, and each email contained the exact same statement:

"Please note that this client has never been into our office for a landing therefore, we do not have any contact information on file."

In some cases other documents provided by the provincial government contradicted those emails, showing the immigrants in question had in fact landed on P.E.I. and attended a meeting at Island Investment Development Inc., the Crown corporation in charge of the PNP.

Gateway closed, says province

The P.E.I. Department of Economic Development provided CBC with a statement acknowledging the province had previously been unable to "prevent immigrants from using [the PNP] as a gateway to other locations within the country because they received their permanent residency up front."

The statement said changes to the program announced in September now prevent that from happening.

The province also said it has asked for a meeting with CBSA to be debriefed on recent proceedings.