At a stroke, Immigration minister Lucienne Robillard would seem to have leveled the jurisdictional bathwater between Quebec, which already sets its own immigration policy, and the other provinces, with the happy bonus of appearing to clean up the worst abuses of the program. The feds push a troublesome dossier off their desk, the provinces are appeased, and the unceasing public clamour to "do something" about immigration is satisfied, if only for a time. Gosh, you don't suppose there's an election on, do you?

As distasteful as it is to see a federal minister yet again kneeling before the provinces, as disgraceful as it is that Ms. Robillard should be pandering yet again to anti-immigrant sentiment, as remarkable as it is that a federal minister from Quebec should yet again presume to make policy for the rest of the country that does not apply in her own province, that does not begin to describe what is wrong with this policy. The problem with the investor immigrant program isn't the odd case of abuse: the fly-by-night investments, the phantom funds. The whole program is an abuse.

The investor program, in line with much of current immigration thinking, is directed at singling out those immigrants who are thought to make a "contribution" to the economy. The same notion underlies the points system for the selection of independent workers. Whether we should prefer immigrants who can help us, rather than those that we can help, would seem a difficult moral dilemma. But it's made a great deal simpler when you realize that the very premise of the exercise, the notion that immigrants, or anyone else, "contribute" to the economy, is nonsensical.

The Economic Council of Canada was at pains to make this point in its definitive 1992 study of immigration. The immigrant who brings money or skills to this country retains full title to both the principal and the return on his capital. Whatever he produces, he is paid for; whatever he puts in, he takes out, the same as anyone. There's no "contribution," in the sense of a transfer of wealth, unless immigrants are being systematically exploited -- that is, unless they receive a return to their investment of financial or human capital that is less than it adds to production. And the Economic Council was equally clear that there is no evidence that this is the case.

Immigrants do make a contribution, in a public finance sense. Prof. Ather Akbari of St. Mary's University in Halifax calculates that the average immigrant family makes a net contribution to the treasury -- taxes paid, minus transfers collected, in excess of the national average -- of nearly $47,000, in 1990 dollars. But that's not what most people have in mind. And in any case, that applies to the immigrant population as a whole, including those supposed drains on the public purse, refugees and family class.

What, then, is the point of setting up a separate category for investors, in which prospective immigrants pay between $350,000 and $450,000 into an investment fund, depending on the province of destination, for the privilege of being taxed to death on their earnings? Is it that Canada lacks investment capital, domestic or foreign? Rubbish: we're wading around hip-deep in the stuff.

Or are we to believe there are good investment opportunities waiting to be filled, which homegrown entrepreneurs have overlooked but which an investor living halfway around the world is somehow better placed to spot?

This seems unlikely, to say the least: more probably, immigrants are implicitly subsidizing investments that would otherwise not pass muster, accepting an inferior risk-adjusted return on their investment in exchange for a visa. Whether this deliberate misallocation of capital is good for them, it's plenty bad for the economy as a whole.

And, of course, that last, lame rationale for the program has just been shut down. Henceforth, the program will be run on the Quebec model, which means immigrant funds will be steered into safe, risk-free vehicles operated by the banks or even Crown corporations. A very large portion, 40 per cent, will have to be invested within the province's borders. We have already allowed provincial immigration policies to balkanize the labour market (it really is the case that you can be admitted to Canada but not admitted to Quebec); now we will allow them to balkanize the capital market as well.

None of this will concern Ms. Robillard. It will keep her department happy, whose only thought seems to be to find new ways to keep immigrants out of the country. It will keep her cabinet colleagues happy, in the runup to the election. And it will keep the empire-builders in the provinces happy. So sad about the country, but you know it can't be helped.