The incentives operate under a cloak of secrecy that is unusual for similar efforts in Canada and the United States, critics say. The province will not name the companies that get the breaks. The only information available about them is on the website of a nonprofit that promotes the program.

“This is essentially a temporary foreign-worker program for the rich, with secret government subsidies for multinational corporations,” said Dermod Travis, the executive director of IntegrityBC, a nonpartisan political watchdog group based in Victoria, the provincial capital. “The government is selling B.C. as a tax haven for the global elite to park investment here, but not have to contribute.”

The provincial Ministry of Finance, which runs the effort, says it is a success, with 82 companies participating. Jamie Edwardson, a spokesman for the ministry, declined in an email to identify those companies or discuss the amount of refunds each has received, citing a ban on publicly disclosing taxpayer information in the law that created the incentives. He said the law protects taxpayer privacy.

At one point, the tax breaks were projected to create more than 13,000 jobs in British Columbia. According to ministry figures, though, fewer than 300 have been created as a result of the program, and possibly as few as 122.

To illustrate the plan’s success, Mr. Edwardson pointed to decade-old data in a consultant’s 2009 economic analysis, which estimated that between 2001 and 2007, the additional investment added anywhere from 124 million to 141 million Canadian dollars — between $91 million and $103 million — to the economy. Mr. Edwardson said these figures were the most recent available.