Canadian Government Developing a Digital Dollar

Posted on November 8, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

The Winnipeg Royal Canadian Mint, where the circulation coins of Canada and other countries are produced. The Mint hopes to develop a digital replacement for physical coins in the MintChip

The Royal Canadian Mint, a Crown Corporation responsible for minting Canada’s coins, is developing a digital version of the Canadian dollar that it hopes will make digital transactions as easy as cash-based ones.

The technology being developed is called MintChip, and the Mint is describing it as the ‘evolution of currency’. It relies on public-key cryptography and tamper-proof hardware to create non-reversible digital payments that do not require a connection to a third party payment processor like a bank or credit card network to complete.

The technology is not expected to be unhackable, but to keep risks for small-value digital transactions at manageable levels. The Mint says that due to the absence of transaction fees, the chips would also allow micro-transactions as low as 1 cent ($0.01).

The chip is still in the R&D phase, and it’s not known when, if ever, it will be released for public use.

To push the technology along, the Mint held a MintChip Challenge this year that invited software developers to create prototypes of applications of the technology. The competition ended in September with the winning teams being awarded a total of $52,700 worth of .9999 purity gold at a ceremony on October 25th.

While ambitious and seemingly far-fetched, it appears the Mint is quite far along in developing a replacement for physical banknotes and coins. If successful, the MintChip project would make Canada the first country in the world to have digital government-issued cash, giving its economy a leg up in the race to be a globally competitive centre of innovation.

Immigration Ministry Provides More Information on New “Start-up Visa”

Posted on September 12, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney with venture capitalist Kevin O'Leary in a joint news conference in April in the first announcement about the new start-up visa

Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) has released more information about the upcoming ‘start-up visa’, which is being designed for foreign tech entrepreneurs who want to a start a business in Canada.

“The start-up visa is an initiative that the government of Canada is exploring to assist in transforming our immigration system into a fast, fair and flexible system that will meet the needs of our economy and help grow our country,” said Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s press secretary, Alexis Pavlich.

The new visa will be granted to individuals who receive funding from Canadian venture capital firms, who CIC assumes have a high potential to create successful Canadian companies that generate jobs and economic growth.

2,750 start-up visas will be set aside each year, up from 700 entrepreneur class visas granted in 2011. CIC suspended the entrepreneur program in July 2011, saying it was “overly burdensome and ineffective”, and needed to be revamped.

Canadian Government to introduce ‘Startup Visas’ for Foreign Entrepreneurs

Posted on April 18, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

Kevin O'Leary (right) and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney in a joint news conference on Wednesday

In a joint announcement today, Kevin O’Leary’s venture capital firm, O’Leary Ventures, and the Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Ministry introduced a new ‘Startup Visa’ for foreign entrepreneurs looking to start a company in Canada.

The Canadian government will be consulting with venture capitalists and other leaders in the startup industry over the next few months to get their input on how the program should be designed to maximize the benefit for Canada’s venture capital industry, and a pilot program is planned to be instituted later in the year.

Venture capital industry leaders like O’Leary believe the Startup Visa program will help attract global entrepreneurial talent to Canada and attract more capital to Canada’s startup sector, which will contribute to creating a more innovative and prosperous economy.

O’Leary has a large following in Canada due to his successful investment record, which includes founding an education software company, Softkey, and selling it for $4.2 billion, and for his starring role in the Canadian venture capital reality show, Dragon’s Den, among other programs.

Canadian Government to increase Investor Program Financial Requirements

Posted on March 16, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

Last year, only 30 minutes after it began, the federal government’s investor program reached its quota of 700 applicants. Now Canadian Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney wants to increase the amount immigration applicants need to invest to become permanent residents of Canada.

As reported in the National Post, Mr. Kenney said:

“I’ve always said that I believe Canada has been underselling itself through our Immigrant Investor Program ..

They get permanent residency in the best country in the world for lending Canadian governments $800,000 for five years … so it seems to me, given there are millions of millionaires around the world who would love to come to Canada, we can do better than that and we’re looking at ways we can redesign the program to extract more bang for the buck.”

Instead of an $800,000 loan to the federal government for five years, Mr. Kenney said he would prefer that that immigrant investors be required to make a permanent investment in Canada, and to show that the investment created a certain number of jobs for a certain number of years.

That is how the federal government’s entrepreneur program, suspended last July, worked. That program is currently being revamped to attract more “high value innovators” and is expected to be re-instated soon.

Mr. Kenney also said that the federal government is considering increasing the size of the required investment, which is currently less than the $1 million required by the investor programs of Australia and the US, and the equivalent of $1.6 million required by the UK’s.

Canadian Immigration Minister to announce new Entrepreneur Program

Posted on March 14, 2012 by CICS Immigration Team

Canadian Citizen and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says that the Canadian government will introduce its new immigrant entrepreneur program soon, which will target “high value innovators” and not be saddled with the problems of the previous entrepreneur program.

In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Mr. Kenney said that the previous program, that was suspended in July of last year, was overly burdensome and ineffective.

The Globe and Mail article notes that the previous program had a backlog of 10,000 applications, with a processing rate of only 1,000-1,500 per year, meaning a best-case clearing time of eight years.

The Immigration Minister said that what will be done with the backlog has not been determined. One option the Canadian government is considering is allowing provinces to cherry pick applicants from the backlog that they believe are the most promising, so that applicant processing time is determined more by the needs of provinces for applicants’ skills and experience, rather than the criteria used in the old program of time spent in the queue.

Mr. Kenney said that New Zealand has used a similar process since 2003, when it faced a large backlog like the one Canada currently faces. A pilot program allowing provinces to mine the backlog has already started, he said.