That is terrible. Direct result of populist "keep them out" polices.
Possibly not. I've known several people who have emigrated from various bits of Europe to Canada. They all found the immigration process irksome, but because of its bureaucratic rigidity and insistence on dotting every i and crossing every t no matter how trivial, not because they felt it was slanted against them. All a few years ago so things might have changed.
All the Canadians I've know seem pretty welcoming of immigrants no matter where they are from. Although there was an undercurrent of dislike towards rich Chinese who started turning up as China liberalised economically. The thing that was always mentioned was that the Chinese they seemed to form rich 'ghettoes' which didn't seem to be a thing with any other immigrants. Richmond in BC is an example of the phenomenon. Not so much a "coming over here taking our jobs" thing as a "coming over here buying our property, pushing up prices" thing.
Unfortunately, I do not know for myself whether that is fact or some exaggeration, but the Chinese have been portrayed as buying up the properties and pushing up the prices, as you indicated. However, the grapevine indicates that those buyers are not coming over here and are instead only investors. The interpretation is that prices are driven up, but that there are now residences standing empty in cities which have lack of available housing stock.
-- that is the story I get when I am a long way away halfway to the other coast
When I was hearing moans about this (when visiting BC) was over twenty years ago, and the levels of wealth building up in China where nothing like they are today. So, it was actual pukka immigrants buying houses and living in them that was the source of the bickering, not the "getting cash out to somewhere safe" that we've seen in recent years. Today in London (the real one, not the Ontario ersatz one) there are swathes of very high end property with no one living in them bought with money expatriated by Russians, Chinese and probably people from everywhere with a fickle government - so as that phenomenon goes it's not unique to Canada. As far as Richmond goes, back when I was talking about, there was also moaning about Chinese immigrants buying up a property, demolishing it, and putting up a Chinese Canadian version of the McMansion. All in all I got the feeling that the underlying gripe was more to do with not assimilating enough to be
both Canadian and Chinese - basically, not enough "becoming a Canadian" in the mix. ("
I mean, do they even play ice hockey, eh?".
)
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