How Montreal is sticking it to Vancouver

   Montrealers occasionally hear ex-Montrealers boast about how great it is to live on the West Coast.
   Indeed entire websites exist to allow former Quebecers to crow about their great decision to leap from the lobster pot to greener Canadian pastures. (Control your metaphors! - Chimples)
   Montrealers transplanted to Vancouver might be the worst of all, as they drone on about how warm, beautiful and leafy it is and how they love walking around the mountains in sweat pants and K-Ways.
   But we get the last laugh by making good coin while making Vancouver homes unaffordable.
  Wait. What?
   How can Quebec make money and raise Vancouver home prices? 
  C'est quoi le rapport?
  We pull off this circus stunt by taking money from millionaire immigrants to allow them to move west.
    Quebec has maintained a system that allows foreign families with wealth of $1.6 million or more to buy a Canadian passport by loaning the provincial government $800,000 interest-free for five years.
   The feds pulled the plug on their immigrant investor program a couple of years back.
   But Quebec, for some reason, has its own immigration system.
   Quebec sold citizenship to 65,151 immigrant investors (mostly from China) between 2002 and 2014.
   Once those wealthy newcomers arrived in Quebec, many quickly moved to Vancouver and spent big coin on housing.
   So now as a result, many Vancouver residents can no longer afford living in their own city.
  It's a great deal for Quebec though.
   Quebec targets 1,750 household investor immigration applications annually.
   So Quebec bags about $1.4 billion in interest free loans five-year loans per year from the deal.
   If Quebec were to score a 10 percent return on that interest free loan - as the Caisse du Depot has been known to get - that deal brings Quebec $140 million annually in exchange for making Vancouver unaffordable to all but these immigrants, and Vancouver celebs Michael J. Fox, Brian Adams and Michael Buble.
   In 2013 Quebec fielded 5,389 investor immigration applications from foreign households (each household representing about 3.6 people). In 2014 that total decreased to 1,400 partly because bureaucracy-loving Quebec made the 15-page application too complicated and onerous.

Vancouver the unaffordable

   So how has this scheme hurt Vancouver exactly?
   Take the Crack Shack or Mansion? test to fully understand.
   Vancouver real estate has become a "world class freakshow," as Vancouver journalist Ian Young has noted in several articles and in an interview on Canadaland.
 Vancouver has a price-to -income ratio of 10.6.
  A decade ago that ratio was 5.3. That's a 100 percent hike in a decade.
   Other expensive cities like London and New York have seen wages rise with home prices, but not Vancouver, which has seen more wealth migration than any other city in the world.
   Montreal might find it hard to relate to the problem of having too many rich people.
   Unlike other big Canadian cities Montreal home prices have risen slower than a Terry Harper slapshot. (see graph).  
   Compared to other large Canadian cities, Montreal has by far Canada's slowest GDP growth. We have the highest unemployment rate and population has grown about half the rate of its peers.