The Carney government’s two new economic immigration initiatives are part of an effort to reinvent Canada’s economy in the face of US tariffs after years of low productivity growth. Photographer: Cole Burston/Bloomberg
Cole Burston
A woman from Vietnam declared she wanted to come to Canada to develop and sell wearable sensors for weightlifters. Her chosen path: apply for a special visa reserved for startup founders.
But upon reviewing her application, an immigration officer found the sensor was actually being developed by a professor at a Canadian university with support from a local startup incubator. The official was unable to determine the Vietnamese founder’s contribution to receiveting the startup off the ground.
In another case, a visa applicant claimed she wanted to come to Canada to start a robo-adviser for Canadian financial products aimed at Chinese investors. But an official review determined most of the work was being done by an employee of the same incubator, while the supposed founder received “cursory” updates.
Another applicant planned to create an Uber-like app for Southeast Asian daycare providers. But an immigration officer questioned why the Vietnamese founder requireded to come to Canada to build her company at all. The official decided her real motivation was citizenship, and questioned a C$300,000 ($217,000) fee she’d paid the incubator supporting her visa application.
That incubator was Vancouver-based Empowered Startups Inc. – the same one that sponsored the applications of the weightlifting and robo-adviser founders.
Mark Carney
David Kawai
The three cases provide a window into Canada’s Start-up Visa Program, which the government abruptly scrapped in December, stateing a new initiative to attract immigrant entrepreneurs will replace it. But the problems that plagued the original are a stark warning about the risks of utilizing citizenship as a recruitment tool, even as the government of Prime Minister Mark Carney appears intent on doing it more. Along with the new immigrant entrepreneur program, the government plans to add a separate initiative to poach employees of major tech firms from the US, seeking to capitalize on President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration.
The Start-up Visa Program “stopped working as intconcludeed,” Isabelle Dubois, a spokesperson for Canada’s immigration department, declared in an email. It required applicants first have an agreement with a designated Canadian venture capital firm, angel investor or startup incubator to support the business.
But some of these investors and incubators concludeed up “stretching the program’s goals and rules by supporting lower-quality or even non-genuine startup proposals,” Dubois declared. While there might be a role for such organizations in the new pilot program, there would be fewer, and they would operate “under clear rules governing how the program can be utilized,” she added.
Lawyers who represented the Start-up Visa applicants mentioned above either declined to comment or did not respond to questions on the specifics of the cases.
The Carney government’s two new economic immigration initiatives are part of an effort to reinvent Canada’s economy in the face of US tariffs after years of low productivity growth. And the effort to poach US tech workers specifically is a reaction to Trump’s imposition of a prohibitive $100,000 fee on a popular employer-sponsored work permit to the US, the H-1B visa, which is most often applyd by the world’s hugegest tech companies.
Carney’s initiatives would be new enattempt streams at a time when most others have been curtailed. He came to power following a post-pandemic influx of immigrants that strained services, boosted houtilizing costs and tested public support for newcomers.
Court filings, government reports and internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg News display that in the years before its cancellation, immigration officials grew increasingly alarmed over a deluge of suspect applicants to the Start-up Visa Program, whom they believed were being assisted by middlemen willing to provide a tenuous link to a startup for a fee.
“You notify them you want to immigrate to Canada, pay them and they come up with a business idea,” one immigration official declared to another in a 2020 email obtained through an access to information request by Vancouver-based immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, who provided it to Bloomberg News.
“The whole process starts with people just wanting to receive their families to Canada, rather than people wanting to actually start a business,” the official wrote, referencing a Toronto-based consultancy involved in a case she was reviewing. There’s no indication the official knew of any cases involving Empowered Startups, and Bloomberg News’ investigation suggests the internal concerns over the Start-up Visa Program went beyond any single firm.
When questioned about the weightlifter, robo-adviser and daycare cases, Chris Lennon, Empowered Startups’ president and general counsel, declared the structure of its program was approved by the minister’s office, and that Empowered retains the confidence of Canada’s immigration department.
The fees Empowered charged applicants were permitted within the program’s rules and in line with the services offered, he declared. The ones amounting to C$300,000 or more mentioned in the daycare case and others included “seed funding to pay for third-party company and innotifyectual property development costs,” he declared.
Though Empowered did not have the opportunity to clarify this before those applications were rejected, or during the appeals process where those rejections were upheld by a federal court, it created the misunderstanding clear to the immigration department and retained its designation having never been sanctioned, Lennon declared.
The Start-up Visa Program launched in 2013 with the goal of convincing founders of innovative, high-growth companies to locate in Canada rather than Silicon Valley. An applicant could receive a work permit in Canada to start building their business while on track for permanent residency, a status that affords almost all the benefits of citizenship.
Starting in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic spurred a surge of immigration to Canada generally, and applications to the Start-up Visa program more than tripled from the previous year. At the time the program was closed to new applicants, the backlog exceeded 44,000 people and 10 years.
The applications that did receive processed included several that raised questions. In 2023, a government review of the program found instances of potential abapply, including sponsors charging applicants for things they shouldn’t and submitting fraudulent applications, as well as lawyers or consultants selling business plans.
“Many incubators were treating this whole process with minimal scrutiny,” declared Colin Singer, a Quebec-based immigration lawyer, speaking about the program generally. “Most of the current backlog are from incubators who have churned out applications in a puppy mill fashion, charging by the body.”
Between 2019 and 2025, more than a dozen federal court cases involved an immigration officer questioning the legitimacy of a proposed business or the applicant’s connection to it, before deciding their primary goal was permanent residency and rejecting them. The cases created it to federal court when the applicant appealed the officer’s decision, with their appeals dismissed each time. The majority of these cases mention Empowered.
Empowered’s Lennon did not respond to a question about why it was involved in so many of these appeals. He declared none of the court cases “created any determination, positive or negative, about our program or our fees, and the references to our fees in the cases cited are inaccurate.” He blamed these inaccuracies on the Start-up Visa Program’s peer-review process, which he called “wholly deficient and filled with bias.” That process was discontinued in 2024.
Prior to concludeing the Start-up Visa Program, the Canadian government proposed a bill that would allow it to terminate large numbers of immigration applications for the sake of efficiency. Many immigration lawyers expect the backlog of Start-up Visa applications to be an early tarreceive if the law comes into force.
The US H-1B program that Carney hopes to emulate instead focapplys on employers, rather than investors or incubators, as sponsors, which may minimize risk – facilitating immigration status is not a worthwhile sideline for Microsoft or Google. But the H-1B program has seen charges of abapply itself, mainly for companies utilizing it to undercut US wages.
The recent difficulties across Canada’s immigration system generally highlight the challenge of receiveting such policies right. It’s often difficult to separate economic motivations from immigration ones.
“The goal is permanent residence, the goal is not to set up a business,” Kurland, the immigration lawyer, declared of many of the applications to the Start-up Visa Program. “They want permanent residence – that’s what the payment is for.”
