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The new premier of Quebec has promised to reduce immigration to his province by 20 per cent, require newcomers to learn French in three years and restrict some public servants from wearing religious symbols.

Premier-designate Francois Legault won a majority on Oct. 1 in large part because he professed to be committed to better “integrating” newcomers into the francophone province. But so far Legault has not hinted at ending Quebec’s divisive immigrant-investor program, one of the world’s biggest wealth migration schemes.

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The Quebec Immigrant Investor Program — which attracts nine out of 10 of its millionaire applicants from Asia, mostly China — does the opposite of integrating immigrants into a distinct culture. Only one in 10 of the well-to-do migrants who take advantage of Quebec’s investor program choose to live in that province.

Most of the roughly 5,000 migrants a year who exploit Quebec’s buy-a-passport program immediately move to Metro Vancouver and Toronto, where their foreign-sourced dollars pump up the cities’ already high-priced real estate. The decades-old Quebec Immigrant Investor Program is a cynical scheme that doesn’t do what it claims.