Richmond agent stole immigrants’ ICBC payments
By Jason Proctor CBC News Posted: May 11, 2012 11:33 AM PT Last Updated: May 11, 2012 1:33 PM PT
A B.C. provincial court judge sentenced a Richmond insurance agent to one year in jail Thursday for stealing cash from dozens of customers’ insurance payments to pay for his trips to a casino.

Ka Chun Chan, 48, preyed on Chinese immigrants with very little command of English. According to an agreed statement of facts he claimed he took the money to maintain a gambling habit.

He instructed clients to make cheques payable to him rather than to the Insurance Corporation of B.C.
‘Are they going to get the message from Mr. Chan that Canada is a corrupt place?
—Judge Ron Fratkin

The scheme began to unravel when ICBC started notifying clients their Autoplan premiums were in arrears or unpaid.

In the meantime — dozens of motorists with high-end vehicles were driving around Lower Mainland roads without insurance.

UBC appeals professor’s racial discrimination complaint

By Jonny Wakefield

Chan is at UBC, which is about 80% Chinese

UBC is appealing a professor’s racial discrimination complaint to the BC Supreme Court.

A BC Human Rights Tribunal (HRT) decision called for a full judicial hearing over a complaint made by former UBC Education professor Jennifer Chan. But the university is arguing that the university’s internal review process has already put the case to rest.

Chan alleges that she was a victim of racial discrimination when considered for one of the university’s research chairs.

Chan, who is of Chinese descent, was a finalist for the Lam Chair in Multicultural Education but was not selected. She has argued that sloppy appointment procedures allowed racial bias to creep into the process. Chan filed a human rights complaint in May 2010. Earlier this year, the HRT declined UBC’s application to dismiss the complaint.

“The university believes the BC Human Rights Tribunal made some important errors in its preliminary rulings on the case of Associate Professor Chan,” said Lucie McNeil, Director of UBC Public Affairs.

‘Not permissible’ to speculate on claimant’s religion

By Douglas Quan, Ottawa Citizen

The Federal Court has once again rebuked the Immigration and Refugee Board for the way it probed the genuineness of a refugee claimant’s spiritual beliefs and practices.

The Falun Gong insignia

“The Board is tasked with assessing the applicant’s credibility and not the soundness of his theology,” Justice Donald J. Rennie wrote in a decision.

“A claimant may have a poor understanding of the minutiae of the religious doctrine but that does not, necessarily, mean his faith is not genuine.”

The judge’s remarks stem from a decision last year by an IRB adjudicator to deny the refugee claim of Zhang Sheng Wang, who said he feared persecution in his native China because of his practice of Falun Gong.

Wang said he began practising Falun Gong in 2007 to try to cure his insomnia. After three months, he began to feel the benefits and continued to practise with friends at a member’s house.

In October 2008, a lookout warned them that officials with the Chinese Public Security Bureau were on their way. While Wang was able to escape, two practitioners were arrested.

With the help of a smuggler, Wang fled to Canada in early 2009 and ended up in Toronto.

By Pete McMartin, Vancouver Sun

In Saturday’s column, I wrote about a study of Vancouver real estate prices by Andy Yan, an urban planner with Bing Thom Architects and an adjunct professor with the University of B.C.’s School of Community and Regional Planning.

Vancouver is soon to be a Chinese colony

In the study, Yan plotted the worth of all homes in neighbour-hoods zoned single-family residential – or RS, in planning par-lance. He plotted those homes assessed at over $1 million.

The study was an update of a similar one he had done in 2011, and Yan did the update to see what change there had been in the number of million-dollar homes.

He found a radical change.

In a single year, the number of million-dollar homes had increased by 10 per cent. More than half the single-family homes in Vancouver were now assessed at over $1 mil-lion. All homes had increased in value by at least $55,000 (out-stripping Vancouver’s median family income of $53,000) and 80 per cent of the homes had increased in assessed value by over $100,000.

He also found the traditional disparity in real estate prices between the west and east sides of the city had begun to blur. Several east-side neighbour-hoods had seen tremendous growth in the number of homes assessed at over $1 million.

The alarm over such increases has inspired, among other things, the Mayor’s Task Force on Housing Affordability.

It has also inspired calls to impose restrictions on offshore buyers, particularly those from China.

To judge by the increasing number of media stories, and the apocryphal tales of wealthy Chinese offering cash by the shovelful, and the unbridled (and usually vitriolic) comments about such buyers on web pages and in newspapers’ public comment sections, many believe that nouveau riche Chinese nationals are the main reason for the price increases.

By Mike Raptis, The Province

Liberal MLA Jon Yap

Richmond-Steveston MLA John Yap was appointed Minister of State for Multiculturalism by Premier Christy Clark on Saturday, filling the void left by departed MLA Harry Bloy.

Yap, first elected in 2005 and re- elected in 2009, has previously held

the positions of climate action minister and parliamentary secretary for clean technology.

Most recently, Yap has served as chair for the B.C. immigration task force.

Of the 17,934 Chinese students entering Canada in 2010, 6,061 went to B.C.

Immigration fraudsters exploiting new rules
Federal anti-fraud unit finds 22 per cent of Chinese applicants misrepresented credentials
By Peter O’Neil, Vancouver Sun January 10, 2012

New federal immigration rules passed in 2008 to make the system more streamlined and “responsive” to Canadian economic needs were exploited by Chinese fraudsters, according to newly released internal documents.

The Conservative government quickly confirmed that the documents, obtained by immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, reflect a continuing problem that needs to be tackled.