Who will pay the taxes for universities, health care and rapid transit if residents of some of Metro Vancouver’s exclusive neighbourhoods are reporting poverty-level incomes?

Some homeowners in tony parts of the west side of Vancouver and Richmond are claiming to have income as low as people struggling in Vancouver’s poor Downtown Eastside.

The tax unfairness caused by the growing phenomenon of mansion owners alleging poverty can be traced largely to Canada failing to catch trans-national migrants who refuse to report their total global income at tax times.

A study by University of B.C. geographer Dan Hiebert shows the problem is worse in Metro Vancouver than in Montreal and Toronto. It’s the unintended consequence of Metro becoming a popular destination for those who gained a Canadian passport through the business-investor immigrant program.

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Statistics Canada data shows the upscale neighbourhoods in Metro where more than 30 per cent of adults are reporting poverty have a high proportion of immigrants, writes Hiebert.

The most contradictory-appearing “low-income” area of Metro Vancouver is the elite tree-lined west side neighbourhood of Shaughnessy-Arbutus Ridge.

It includes Prince of Wales Secondary School, Quilchena Park and the luxurious hillside houses north of 37th Avenue, which typically sell in the $2-million to $6-million range.

The neighbourhood (which StatsCan technically calls a “census tract”) south of Oakridge Shopping Centre also has a curiously high proportion of residents reporting poverty, even though most people there own either expensive houses or stylish condominiums.

In addition, a large collection of adjacent neighbourhoods in north-central Richmond, where roughly 40,000 people tend to own either pricey houses or condos, has an unusually strong percentage claiming low incomes.

Hiebert’s study, for the Institute for Research on Public Policy, dovetails with the findings of Vancouver mathematician Jens von Bergmann, formerly of The University of Calgary.

Von Bergmann found 25,000 households in the city of Vancouver alone, almost one in 10, declare less income than they spent on their housing costs. His maps, published by the South China Morning Post, show most are in the west side.

Both Hiebert and Von Bergmann discovered most of the Metro neighbourhoods where residents own expensive houses but many declare low income contain a much higher than Metro average of visible minorities, particularly of Chinese origin.

Immigration Canada is aware of the reported-earnings anomaly. It released data this year showing refugees to the country appear to earn more income on average than the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have arrived via the business-investor program. The latter were required to temporarily invest $800,000 in Canada.

Many of the Metro households in fashionable neighbourhoods that claim low incomes appear to follow the well-documented “astronaut” scenario of investor immigrants, in which husbands often work offshore while their school-age children live in Canada.

UBC geographer David Ley says Canada’s business-investor immigration programs have led to “200,000 people coming to (Metro) Vancouver … in the last generation.”

In Millionaire Migrants: Trans-Pacific Life Lines, Ley cites a Chinese-Canadian Historical Society report that two of three Hong Kong males who obtained a Canadian passport work and live outside the country. A Citibank official in East Asia estimated only 10 per cent of trans-national migrants’ assets are initially transferred to Canada.