HESA: Credulous Nonsense on Colleges from the CBC

Good analysis and critique. Shameful that the CBC declined to interview Usher as part of their reporting:

…So why did the CBC react as if it did?

This was the question I asked them when a CBC producer tried to get me to comment on the story on December 27th. Why would you do a story on so little evidence? I said I didn’t think the evidence merited a story but agreed to speak to them if they wanted someone to explain exactly why the evidence was so thin. You will no doubt be shocked to learn that CBC then declined to interview me.

Upon reading the story, it’s not hard to understand why. With zero evidence, they got a bunch of experts to repeat talking points about the awfulness of student visas that they’ve been repeating for months now.

Raj Sharma, a Calgary-based immigration lawyer, told said “If the allegations are true, it reveals shocking gaps in our integrity protocols.… This is deeply, deeply concerning and problematic,” adding that the allegations suggest “wide-scale human smuggling.”

(The “if” in that sentence is doing a hell of a lot of work – AU)

Kelly Sundberg, a former Canada Border Services Agency officer who is a professor of criminology at Mount Royal University, said the system has no oversight and is “being exploited” by transnational criminals. “This type of fraud, of gaming our immigration system has been going on for quite some time actually,” he said, noting that the volume of those potentially involved “is staggering.”

Ken Zaifman, a Winnipeg-based immigration lawyer, says that from his experience, the responsibility of oversight should lie with the educational institutions, but that they did not do so because “they were addicted to international students to fund their programs.”

Ok, so, these comments about fraud and oversight are worth examining. I’m trying to imagine how either the government of Canada or an educational institution could legitimately “prevent fraud” or “exercise oversight” in a case like this one. Are colleges and universities supposed to be like the pre-cogs in the movie Minority Report, able to spot criminals before they commit a crime? I mean, there is a case to be made that in the past Canada made such cross-border runs more tempting by allowing students’ entire families to join them in Canada while studying (as was the case in the Dingucha affair), but that loophole was largely closed ten months ago when the feds basically stopped giving open work permits to partners of students unless they were enrolled in a graduate degree.

Anyways, this is where we are now: our national broadcaster sees no problem running evidence-free stories simply as a platform to beat up on public colleges because that’s a great way to get clicks. Crappy journalism? Sure. But it’s also evidence of the disdain with which Canadian PSE institutions are now viewed by the broader public: CBC wouldn’t run such a thin story unless it thought the target was “soft.” And there’s no solution to our funding woes until this gets sorted out.

Source: HESA: Credulous Nonsense on Colleges from the CBC