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administrator confirmed the failure of monitoring more generally:
'Historically we've never done well as a Department in monitoring issues,
for example terms and conditions. It's just not worth the effort.' As a result
there is no real sanction to comply with the requirements of the BIP. In
principle, deportation is a consequence of non-compliance but in fact virtu-
ally no deportations occur, despite the existence of non-compliance:
It's a failed policy. The sanctions don't meet the needs. If a person says they
can't follow their business plan they are forgiven. This is a major difficulty.
Monitoring is very labour-intensive and the government lacks the resources.
There's de facto forgiveness. Only two to three households in ten years have
been asked to leave Canada.
In the few cases where non-compliance has led to a formal enquiry, charges
have often been stayed on appeal, with the court tending to be liberal in its
decisions (Duffy 1999).
Managers are astute and well aware of the capacity for informal activities
to achieve end runs around the requirements when the monitoring function
is so loose. They know about the 'paper' or 'shadow' ownership of businesses,
but do not have the resources to challenge the practice: 'We're not successful
with paper ownership… we don't have the ability to check it'. They know too
about the 'flipping' of businesses, a chain of successive entrepreneurs buying
and selling the same business to meet their own terms and conditions. They
even cited a case to me of one business that had passed through six owners in
a five-year period, with each owner advised by the same immigration consult-
ant. As we saw from the interviews with entrepreneurs, typically close to half
buy existing businesses and the same proportion sell them soon after terms
and conditions are lifted. Flipping is not illegal, but it does not meet the spirit
of economic development, and it contributes to significant double-counting
(and more) of investment and jobs created that in fact are derived from the
same business. As a result flipping introduces a systemic tendency through
multiple counting to inflate programme benefits reported in the annual
scorecard. I asked a group of managers familiar with the annual scorecard
whether they were confident of its validity:
We don't think so… First, 30-40 percent of people never report. Second, the
data are a snapshot on the day the conditions are cancelled. We can't measure
the day after that. We know an industry exists that creates and flips jobs and
businesses.
Instead, another civil servant told me, 'We've focussed on success stories.
The rest of them we don't see, we never see'. 31 An event during field inter-
viewing dramatically underscored the selective representation of the BIP for
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