Randall Denley: Ontario is not prepared for a cap on international students

2024/01/27 Leave a comment

Nails it:

The federal government’s decision this week to substantially reduce the number of foreign student visas is the right thing to do, but it undermines the finances of Ontario’s colleges and universities and will hamper their ability to serve the province’s students.

Making Ontario’s post-secondary sector significantly reliant on foreign student tuition was an unsustainable, unwise decision that was sure to end badly. Now it has, and Premier Doug Ford’s government seems unready to respond.

It’s not like federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s move to cut the country’s foreign student visas from 600,000 to 360,000 came out of the blue. The government has been telegraphing it for months.

That wasn’t the first warning the Ford government had. Ontario’s auditor general criticized overreliance on international tuition in both 2021 and 2022. Late last year, an expert panel appointed by the Ford government warned that “Many colleges and universities have passed the point where they could survive financially with only domestic students.”

So far, all the Ford government has done is repeat a second-rate federal Liberal talking point about cracking down on “bad actors,” those being strip mall campuses that licence the curriculum of public community colleges. All with the full knowledge of the provincial government, of course.

There are three bad actors in this story, but none of them operate out of a strip mall.

First, the federal government. It turned foreign student training into a back door immigration system with no limits. Students could work for three years while they studied, then for two or three additional years after that. In all, there are about one million students here on visas now. Only belatedly has the federal government come to admit that flooding the country with unofficial immigrants might contribute to Canada’s housing shortage.

The surge of foreign students worked remarkably well for the Ontario government. Foreign students pay absurd tuitions, as much as $14,300 a year for a college student and $46,443 a year for a university student. According to the Ontario AG, foreign students accounted for 45 per cent of university tuition revenue and 68 per cent of college tuition fees.

The influx of foreign student money papered over the government’s own neglect of the post-secondary sector. In 2019, Ford cut tuition, then froze it. The government’s direct support for the sector has been meagre. The province’s funding per university student is only 57 per cent of what the rest of the country spends, and it’s even worse for college students at 44 per cent.

Finally, there are the universities and colleges themselves. They have overcome inadequate tuition and government funding by milking foreign students for all they are worth, becoming dependent on their tuition fees in the process.

The absurdity of the situation was illustrated earlier this month when international students at Algoma University’s Brampton campus conducted protests after receiving failing marks. One student got right to the heart of the transaction with a sign saying “CAD 26000 are not enough?” One of his compatriots missed the point altogether with his sign, which read “Education is not for sale.” Of course it is, and these students have the receipts to prove it. The university, an obscure Sudbury institution that has set up shop in Brampton to grab some cash, fixed the issue by putting the students’ marks on a bell curve. Smart move. In 2021-22, the Brampton campus generated 65 per cent of the university’s revenue. You have to keep the customers happy.

Unfortunately for the Ford government, the years of pretending none of this was happening are coming to an end. The federal government hasn’t shut off the student tap entirely, but it’s time for Ontario to figure out how to pay for universities and colleges without an ever-increasing flow of foreign student tuition.

The first challenge will be distributing visa quotas, something the province has not done previously. The new visas are based on population, implying that Ontario might get about 130,000 study visas compared to 300,000 in 2023.

Private colleges that were given a veneer of credibility by licensing curriculum from real community colleges should be cut off. Colleges overall will require a significant trim and a return to their mandate of job training for people in their own communities. They can afford it, for now. Foreign student training has been lucrative. In 2022, all but one Ontario college posted a surplus, with the average being $27 million across the system.

Universities are in a different situation. The Council of Ontario Universities says at least 10 Ontario universities are forecasting deficits this year, amounting to $175 million. Next year, the total is expected to be $273 million. A reduction in foreign student tuition will exacerbate that.

This is all a worrisome situation for Ontario students and their parents. The Ford government needs to put a credible fix in place, quickly.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist, author and former Ontario PC candidate. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com

Source: Randall Denley: Ontario is not prepared for a cap on international students

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French Constitutional Council rejects large parts of controversial immigration law – Le Monde

2024/01/27 Leave a comment

Good summary:

France’s highest constitutional authority rejected more than a third of articles in a contentious immigration bill adopted under pressure from the right, in a decision issued on on Thursday, January 25. The Constitutional Council ruling notably rejected measures toughening access to social benefits and family reunification, as well as the introduction of immigration quotas set by Parliament.

The Council partially or totally rejected 32 articles out of 86 on procedural grounds – ruling that the amendments adopted by Parliament were unrelated to the government’s bill, or “legislative cavaliers.” A further three articles were rejected on the grounds that they were unconstitutional themselves.

The scrapped measures include restrictions to family reunification, access to certain social benefits for non-EU citizens, and the automatic obtention of French citizenship for people who were born and grew up in France. The Council also rejected articles pertaining to student visas and special visas issued for health reasons.

After the Council’s decision, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said the Constitutional Council had “validated the whole of the government’s text,” noting that most of the failed measures were rejected for procedural reasons.

The chairman of the far-right Rassemblement National party, Jordan Bardella, denounced, as expected, a “power grab by the judges, with the support of the president [Emmanuel Macron].” He added: “The only solution is a referendum on immigration.” Eric Ciotti, the leader of the right-wing Les Républicains opposition party which struck a deal with the government to pass a hardened version of the bill, said the Council had “judged based on politics rather than on law.” He called for a constitutional reform.

‘Ideological victory’

The nine members of the Council had been asked to rule on whether the highly divisive text, which caused splits inside President Emmanuel Macron’s coalition, was in conformity with the Constitution. Darmanin, who championed the bill, had admitted that several provisions were “manifestly and clearly contrary to the Constitution.”

Some political observers accused Macron of seeking to pass the buck onto the Constitutional Council. The Constitutional Council registered its displeasure, its president Laurent Fabius declaring it is not “a chamber of appeal against the choices made by Parliament.

Macron also defended the legislation, saying it was needed to reduce illegal immigration but also to facilitate the integration of documented arrivals. On December 20, the day after the vote, the head of state declared that it was “the shield we were missing.” He rejected the idea that the law would enshrine a “national preference” demanded by the RN. But Marine Le Pen claimed it was an “ideological victory.”

Dozens of NGOs slammed what they described as potentially the “most regressive” immigration law in decades. Trade unions and associations called for fresh protests on Thursday, after tens of thousands of people took to the streets across the country at the weekend.

Source: French Constitutional Council rejects large parts of controversial immigration law – Le Monde

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Prousky: Beyond international students: The other problem with Canada’s private education industry

2024/01/27 Leave a comment

Yet another crack in international and domestic students:

…It’s not that hard for Canadian high-school students to buy their seats in the country’s most coveted university programs. For a few thousand dollars, students can enroll at private credit-granting “schools” – usually in strip malls – where they’re almost guaranteed top marks. What these students pay in fees, they can often recoup in scholarship money.

…

The whole thing bears a striking resemblance to the issue of pay-for-citizenship private colleges. At some of these institutions, as many as 90 per cent of students are “no shows,” and in all likelihood are just paying the college for the visa and work permit it affords them. Morally, it’s no different than a domestic student who buys a grade they don’t deserve.

Clearly something beyond a cap on student visas needs to be done to restore the country’s meritocratic values. Shoddy private schools need to be held accountable, regardless of whether they target international or domestic, or high-school or college students.

The problem is, there doesn’t appear to be much data on these private schools, and any available data is wanting. At a minimum, provinces would need to know the acceptance, enrolment, graduation and employment rates at each of these schools. Ontario purports to make this data available, but it’s chock full of missing fields.

There are thousands of these private secondary schools across the country, but do the provinces know how many students attend them and on average how inflated their grades are? If they do, they aren’t sharing this information with universities, and despite auditing these private schools, rarely if ever shut them down.

Some universities have taken matters into their own hands. The University of Waterloo in Southwestern Ontario made headlines in 2018 for its “secret list” of high schools for which they adjust applicants’ grades. But if this effort is going to bring about meaningful change, it requires provincewide co-operation.

Jonah Prousky is a management consultant and freelance writer who focuses on business, technology and society.

Source: Beyond international students: The other problem with Canada’s private education industry

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‘Total chaos for students’: Canada’s international student restrictions slammed by Colleges Ontario

2024/01/26 Leave a comment

Willful blindness? Should have seen this coming:

Calling the federal government’s new restrictions on international students “a moratorium by stealth,” Ontario public colleges are warning that many thousands of students will soon be left in limbo, their hopes on hold.

The public statement released Thursday by Colleges Ontario, which represents the province’s 24 taxpayer-funded colleges, is the most critical response yet from the post-secondary education sector to changes announced this week by Immigration Minister Marc Miller to rein in a system that he’s previously said had “lost its integrity.”

“The decision has been rushed, resulting in a confusing and damaging early rollout. We urge the federal government to immediately engage with us and our provincial government in a meaningful conversation about the material impacts on students and Canada’s reputation,” said the four-page statement.

“Ontario’s public colleges are very concerned about the attacks on a high-performing, efficient public college system — impacting our reputation with potentially long-lasting negative repercussions.”

Public colleges in Ontario, which have seen an exponential growth of international enrolments over the past few years, had kept silent since October, when Miller started rolling out a series of changes to the international student program in response to public pushback about high levels of immigration and criticisms of its impact on affordable housing.

In December, a new system was put in place to authenticate schools’ letters of admission, followed by a doubling the cost-of-living financial requirement for study permit applicants on Jan. 1 to $20,635, in addition to their first year of tuition and travel costs.

Miller’s reforms

On Monday, after weeks of floating the idea of capping the number of international students in Canada, Miller imposed a two-year cap on new study permits issued in 2024, with an aim of reducing the number issued by 35 per cent from 2023’s level, to 364,000. The cap, however, won’t apply to students for master’s and doctoral programs or in elementary and secondary schools; the intake level will be reassessed in 2025.

Source: ‘Total chaos for students’: Canada’s international student restrictions slammed by Colleges Ontario

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Earnings of one-step and two-step economic immigrants: Comparisons from the arrival year – Statistique Canada

2024/01/26 Leave a comment

Another useful study, highlighting that two-step immigrants had better economic outcomes (annual earnings) than one-step immigrants:

Since the early 2000s, the two-step immigration selection process, through which economic immigrants are chosen from the pool of temporary foreign workers, has expanded rapidly. Previous research indicated that following their landing, high-skilled two-step immigrants had higher earnings than comparable one-step immigrants—those directly selected from abroad. However, an important question that has not been fully examined is whether the earnings advantage of two-step immigrants over one-step immigrants persisted if the two groups were compared from their arrival year rather than the year when they became permanent residents. At that point, neither group possessed any Canadian work experience, eliminating its potential influence on their earnings differences. The results of this study reveal that two-step immigrants consistently had higher annual earnings than their one-step counterparts within the same admission class when the comparison started from their initial arrival year. These earnings differences, although reduced, remained substantial after accounting for sociodemographic differences between the two groups and after 10 years following the initial arrival. Furthermore, these patterns generally held across successive arrival cohorts. The conclusion includes a discussion of the implications of these findings and explores potential reasons for these outcomes.

Source: Earnings of one-step and two-step economic immigrants: Comparisons from the arrival year – Statistique Canada

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Apportionment & Immigration: 95 Percent of Noncitizen Growth Went to GOP States Since 2019 – Cato Institute

2024/01/26 Leave a comment

Of interest:

In response to a question about restricting immigration, House Representative Yvette D. Clarke (D‑NY) recently stated, “I need more people in my district just for redistricting purposes.” When a Republican member of Congress askedwhether this was the motivation for other Democrats, including President Biden, to oppose more extreme asylum restrictions during a committee hearing at which I testifiedlast week, former head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Tom Homan stated:

I certainly believe it’s probably associated with the decision to overturn the Trump Census rule, so now [immigrants] will be mandated to be counted in the Census. When we reapportionate [sic] seats, it’s going to have an effect.

Although former President Trump did attempt to exclude some noncitizens from the Census count and from House apportionment, multiple courts foundthose efforts to be illegal and unconstitutional. The Constitution is clear: “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state.” But does this provision of the Constitution—whatever its merits—give Republicans a good reason to oppose immigration?

No, the data are equally clear: recent immigration trends are benefiting Republicans in states where they control the legislature and manage redistricting. About 62 percent of the three‐​million increase in the total immigrant population from March 2019 to March 2023 has occurred in GOP states, according to the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement.

The American Community Survey (with a larger sample size but slightly older data) attributes 60 percent of the growth in the immigrant population to GOP states from July 2019 to July 2022. These percentages are also similar for the Latin American immigrant population growth.

What about noncitizens who might be excluded by a US citizen‐​only census? For them, an overwhelming 95 percent of the increase in the noncitizen population has been in GOP states from March 2019 to March 2023. Eliminating the growth in the noncitizen population from 2019 to 2023 would have cost Republican states 1.2 million people, or about two seats in Congress (the average congressional district has 760,367 people). Figure 1 shows the net increase in immigrant populations for states under GOP and Democratic control.

Table 1 shows the full data from the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement for March 2023 and March 2019. The Republican state leading this trend is Texas, which netted 515,970 noncitizens and 833,028 immigrants overall. Other Republican states experiencing significant growth in their immigrant populations include Kentucky (130,061 noncitizens and 146,790 immigrants), South Carolina (102,096 and 157,396), and Florida (102,055 and 178,052). It is certainly likely that these states are attracting immigrants because of their strong job growth.

The argument that recent immigration is boosting Democratic representation in Congress is unsubstantiated. In 2015, I rebutted this same claim about recent illegal immigration. I noted, “Illegal immigration from 2000 to 2010 netted the Republicans about six seats in redistricting. Democrats managed only about 4.5, giving the Republican states yet again more than a seat advantage.” Clearly, immigration has not helped Democrats in terms of apportionment for decades. Yet, this misconception has become so entrenched that the former president tried to unconstitutionally exclude some noncitizens from the Census count.

I have also explained how it is false that Republicans fare poorly during periods when the immigrant share of the population is high. Republicans have controlled at least one chamber of Congress 85 percent of the years when the immigrant share of the population exceeded 10 percent, while not controlling either chamber 83 percent of all other years. This is a staggering disparity that has been completely overlooked in current political discourse. Republicans should not fear immigration based on unfounded political concerns.

Source: Apportionment & Immigration: 95 Percent of Noncitizen Growth Went to GOP States Since 2019 – Cato Institute

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HESA: What Comes Next: Ontario (the hugely problematic provinces) [international student caps]

2024/01/25 Leave a comment

The insightful Alex Usher on the impact of provinces, with Ontario the focus:

Ontario is, not to put too fine a point on it, a shit show. My impression is that the Ford government, which has been throwing gasoline on the international student fire ever since it got into the office, mainly so it could avoid having to actually spend over its own money on post-secondary education, is in no way equipped policy-wise to deal with the mess it has just been handed.

The first policy question to be answered before getting to the issue of caps is: what the heck to do about the public-private partnership colleges currently strewn around the GTA? As it is, with the graduates denied access to the post-graduate work visa program, it will be difficult for any of them to stay in business, since satisfying this demand is largely their reason for being. That would be brutal on a couple of levels: first on the colleges themselves who would have to teach out their existing students with essentially no money coming in, and second on their parent public colleges who rely on the margin between per-student tuition and per-student payments to the PPPs in order to keep operating under a system in which per-student funding is just 44% of what it is in the other nine provinces.

At least conceptually, there’s another option: What if the public colleges bought out their private partners and operated these institutions directly? The province might well say no—college catchment areas in theory have meaning, and this kind of arrangement would undermine those catchment areas (which is precisely why they all went in the PPP direction in the first place). And net surpluses would be lower if all the staff at these colleges suddenly joined the college unions. It might not be a super-lucrative prospect, but it might be better than the alternative. I could see some institutions trying it.

But being able to make that decision requires you to know what provincial funding is going to look like. If the province comes in with a bailout package—particularly for northern colleges—then the need to keep pushing on those GTA campuses might be lessened. Alternatively, many of those PPP colleges may now move more quickly towards seeking their own degree-granting status through the Post-secondary Education Quality Assessment Board (PEQAB) and start offering their own degree-level programs, escaping the problems created by Monday’s announcement.

(You see how many moving pieces there are here? It’s going to be wild to watch this all work out.).

Only once you work out the PPP piece can you sensibly make decisions about the rest of the system. If the baseline numbers include the PPPs, then everyone is going to take a big hit on their numbers. If the baseline excludes the PPPs, then the hit to the rest of the system will be greatly alleviated. How that gets distributed across the system is still the big unknown. Will it be done equally across all institutions? Will there be a steer to the colleges rather than universities, or vice-versa? How will stand-alone private institutions be treated (Northeastern is the big one to think about in this category). We have no idea. It’s all an enormous mystery. And with a moratorium on visa processing until the provinces figure all this stuff out, there are a lot of very anxious international student divisions out there.

Source: What Comes Next

Reading this article in the Globe, appears British Columbia more advanced in its thinking and planing.

British Columbia and Ontario are planning to crack down on “bad actor” private colleges that they say take advantage of international students, after Ottawa announced a plan to cap foreign study visas for two years.

Source: B.C., Ontario planning crackdown on ‘bad actor’ colleges preying on international students

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Star editorial: Necessary reforms on international students and CILA statement

2024/01/25 Leave a comment

Even the Star supports these restrictions:

After weeks of foreshadowing, the federal government moved this week to cap the number of international student visas over the next two years. File this policy change in the “better late than never” category.

The number of international students flowing to this country has grown by such epic proportions it is difficult to reach any conclusion other than the federal Liberals were simply sleeping on this file. There have been no shortage of red flags, from Statistics Canada reports warning of the strain on affordable housingand access to social services to provincial auditors warning of an unhealthy dependence on international student fees by post-secondary institutions which are being underfunded.

Over the past two years, the number of international students in this country jumped from 617,000 to more than a million. About a third are in public universities but the overwhelming majority are in public colleges or private schools, often offering substandard education and a backdoor route to permanent status in this country. Immigration Minister Marc Miller, in announcing he is cutting the number of study permits by 35 per cent to 364,000 this year, is right to target the shady operators who are preying on international students and not doctoral and postgraduate international students at public universities. Miller says hundreds of the private schools should be shut down.

“It is not the intention of this program to have sham commerce degrees and business degrees that are sitting on top of a massage parlour,” Miller said in making his announcement.

There are a number of threads to unravel from this announcement. First and foremost, as the minister stressed, this is not an indictment of foreign students. They are hardly responsible for a housing crunch or fears over access to stretched social services. International students were more likely the victims, living in crowded, substandard housing, dealing with a much more expensive country that they had anticipated and receiving diplomas which Miller says were being churned out like “puppy mills.” It was creating reputational damage to this country.

But these students would not be in this country without federal approval, so Miller is correcting a problem that his government largely created. According to a memo obtained by The Canadian Press, the Trudeau government was warned in 2022 that there was a widening gap between immigration and housing supply, largely driven by the increasing number of international students and temporary foreign workers admitted to this country.

This cap will be most acutely felt in Ontario, home to 51 per cent of international students. The Doug Ford government has twice been warned about a reliance on international student tuition fees, once in November by his own panel on colleges and universities, and in 2021 by the auditor-general who warned him not to increase a dependency on foreign student fees without a post-secondary education plan in place. The panel reported in November that the Progressive Conservatives had the lowest per student post-secondary funding in the country following a tuition cut and freeze that meant colleges and universities had reached the point at which revenue from international student tuition fees was “fundamental to the sector’s financial sustainability.” Now Ford is forced into some tough decisions. He will have to decide what schools can bring in international students and what schools should be eliminated, while protecting universities in financial trouble.

Finally, the Liberals – and all governments at all levels – must handle matters of immigration, including temporary foreign workers and international students, with utmost delicacy. To their credit, Canadians have held together on a consensus on the accommodation of immigrants. And to their credit, Canadian politicians have largely resisted any base urge to exploit frustration and anxiety in this country by playing the immigration card.

But the numbers are increasing. Some 500,000 immigrants will arrive next year and this country is going through a population boom during challenging economic times. Immigration will dominate much of the upcoming U.S. presidential election and delicacy is not a feature of debate to the south, particularly from Republicans.

It would not take much to bust that Canadian consensus. We trust our politicians to be vigilant on that score.

Source: Necessary reforms on international students

Sensible recommendations in CILA’s statement on Canada’s international student caps

CILA wishes to use this opportunity to highlight other means to better protect international students and promote the integrity of our higher education and immigration systems:

  • Federal and provincial governments must work together to identify how to fund our higher education system in a more sustainable fashion so that colleges and universities are not so reliant on international students to fund their operations.
  • The federal government needs to set more realistic expectations to international students about the feasibility of obtaining permanent residence following graduation. The federal government, in concert with colleges, universities, and immigration consultants continue to tout Canada’s TR to PR pathways, when the reality is attaining PR is a very competitive process that is far from a foregone conclusion.
  • IRCC may wish to consider increasing the English- and French-language proficiency requirements so that approved international students are better equipped to succeed in Canadian classrooms, the economy, and society.
  • Re-introduce the Post-Graduation Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) to international graduates so that employers with genuine labour shortages can obtain work permits for international graduates with in-demand skills. This can also help such international graduates improve their odds of transitioning to PR.
  • Better regulate the conduct of immigration consultants in Canada and overseas to deter them from engaging in unethical behavior or with unauthorized agents that exploit international students.

CILA acknowledges the significant growth in Canada’s international student population has created significant integrity challenges and believes it is incumbent on governments across Canada to do more to provide both Canadian and international students with a better experience. CILA hopes such efforts will lead to a more sustainable path forward for Canada’s international student program. International students enrich Canada in many ways and are key to our global competitiveness. As such, it is imperative Canada get its international student program back on track so we can sustain the economic and social benefits that international students bring for many decades to come.

Source: Source: CILA’s statement on Canada’s international student caps

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Transition to permanent residency and retention of temporary foreign workers in accommodation and food services and food manufacturing

2024/01/25 Leave a comment

Of note, clear difference between lower and higher skilled:

Temporary foreign workers with lower-skill occupations transition to permanent residency at a lower rate than those with higher-skill occupations and study permit holders in the accommodation and food services industry 

The study “Temporary foreign workers with lower-skill occupations in the accommodation and food services industry: Transition to permanent residency and industrial retention after transition” found that 29% of TFWs with lower-skill occupations who entered the accommodation and food services industry from 2010 to 2014 became permanent residents by their fifth year working in the industry. The rates were higher for TFWs with higher-skill occupations (45%) and study permit holders (49%). However, because of their large population size, the number of TFWs with lower-skill occupations who became immigrants was larger than that of TFWs with higher-skill occupations.

Overall, five years after immigration, nearly 40% of TFWs with lower-skill occupations who became permanent residents from 2011 to 2015 stayed in the accommodation and food services industry. By comparison, the rate was higher among TFWs with higher-skill occupations (52%) but lower for study permit holders (16%).

Retention in the food manufacturing industry decreases for temporary foreign workers with lower-skill occupations 

The study “Temporary foreign workers with lower-skill occupations in the food manufacturing industry: Transition to permanent residency and industrial retention after transition” found that five years after starting to work in the food manufacturing industry, TFWs with lower-skill occupations who arrived in Canada from 2010 to 2014 displayed lower cumulative rates of transition to permanent residency (39%) than TFWs with higher-skill occupations (48%).

The percentage of TFWs who stayed in the food manufacturing industry fell gradually over the first five years after immigration. Among TFWs with lower-skill occupations who became permanent residents from 2011 to 2015, the retention rate decreased from 73% in the year of immigration to 36% five years later. The degree of retention of TFWs with lower-skill occupations fell with each successive landing cohort. One year after becoming permanent residents, the percentage of TFWswho stayed in the industry decreased from 69% for the 2006-to-2010 landing cohort to 57% for the 2016-to-2019 landing cohort. 

Source: Transition to permanent residency and retention of temporary foreign workers in accommodation and food services and food manufacturing

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Keller: Thanks to Marc Miller, the immigration system is (slightly) less broken, Clark: Ottawa finally acts on international student visas, setting a challenge for Doug Ford

2024/01/24 Leave a comment

Two of the better assessments:

Every journey begins with a first step. The Trudeau government has finally taken a step toward fixing what it broke in Canada’s immigration system. This is not the end of the trip, not even close. But it’s a start.

Ottawa didn’t do the breaking on its own. The provinces helped. So did business.

…Mr. Miller has finally taken a first step to repairing the immigration system. All he has to do now is keep walking.

Source: Thanks to Marc Miller, the immigration system is (slightly) less broken

Still, Mr. Ford faces a challenge now. The days of unlimited student visas are numbered, so his government has to decide which schools will get them. Will they prioritize top-notch talent, or keep business going for a low-standard industry?

Of course, Ontario’s failing shouldn’t let the federal Liberals off the hook. They were asleep while the number of temporary residents ballooned. It took ages for the Liberals to even see that massive policy failure while the damaging consequences were piling up on so many ordinary folks.

Finally, albeit belatedly, Mr. Miller has acted. Over to you, Mr. Ford.

Source: Ottawa finally acts on international student visas, setting a challenge for Doug Ford

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