@charlesadler: Affordable housing — or else

2023/09/01 Leave a comment

Another voice jointing the chorus:

“I think we need to do some serious thinking here.” — Housing Minister Sean Fraser discussing the idea of putting a cap on the number of foreign students in Canada, Aug. 21 in Charlottetown, P.E.I.

Let’s begin with a fact of life that most Canadians are unaware of — about 800,000 foreign students are now living in Canada.

The minister for housing revealed the number. The key reason is university economics.

Tuition for foreign students is substantially higher than it is for Canadian citizens. And universities are always looking for money.

There is no easier place to find it than young people around the world seeking a university education in Canada.

Most of these students are not living in university campus housing. There isn’t nearly enough of that housing stock available. So they compete for mostly rental housing with millions of Canadian citizens.

Eight hundred thousand is the kind of number that is forcing the housing minister and his government to do some “serious thinking” about limiting the number of foreign students Canada admits every year. There is no doubt the government is also revisiting its immigration targets.

The government plans to bring in an estimated 500,000 immigrants every year. But if we continue to have a dearth of housing in this country, we have to take seriously the idea of bringing in fewer people.

It’s axiomatic that politics cannot change the math.

But the math can and does change politics.

The most credible information on housing statistics comes from the federal Crown corporation known as the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC). CMHC figures say the country will need to build nearly six million new housing units in Canada in the next seven years to accommodate our population growth. One out of three will be rentals.

There is a multitude of reasons we may not hit those targets.

Ironically, one of those reasons might be any decision to slow down immigration. Canada’s construction trades rely heavily on immigrant workers.

The sad truth is many countries do a good job of encouraging their citizens to take up various trades. Canada is not one of them. But if we continue to have more newcomers than places where we can house them, we will continue to have a housing crisis in this country.

In some cities, rents are becoming outrageously expensive. As is always the case in conversations about the price of shelter in Winnipeg, we have it good relative to places like Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, the three cities that have been largely responsible for electing the last three Liberal governments. But relatively good is not the same as actually good.

While the housing picture is murky, especially in Canada’s largest population centres, the politics could not be clearer.

Justin Trudeau’s government will be evicted by the voters two years from now unless steps are taken to reduce the growth in the price of homes and rent.

There is no point in pretending that housing is a one-size-fits-all issue.

We need different kinds of new housing for different people. For low-income people, we must build new government or co-op housing at affordable prices. The same goes for seniors who rely exclusively on their pension income to be involved in the housing market. The government has the means to create its own market for people without means, whether they are old or young.

The same goes for student housing. It’s no mystery where the students are. They’re on campus. And so apartment units have to be built close to campuses and rented out at rates that are lower than the free market in buildings that aren’t competing for the free market.

They’re owned by government agencies created for the needs of students, working-class families and low-income seniors.

Can the government do this in Canada? Of course they can. There is nothing I am suggesting that governments calling themselves liberal democracies or social democracies aren’t doing in many parts of the world.

After the Second World War, it made sense for the federal government to build housing across Canada for veterans returning home to young families. We’re in a cost of living war right now.

And for the government of the day, on this day and this year and next year and the year after that, it’s a political war for hearts and minds that it cannot afford to lose. The next election hinges on it.

More importantly, a less stressful quality of life for millions of Canadians, requires it.

Charles Adler is a longtime political commenter and podcaster.

Source: Affordable housing — or else

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‘Culling’ bad actors capitalizing on tuition fees more effective than capping student visas in bid to fix housing crisis: immigration lawyer

2023/08/31 Leave a comment

Good long read. Insights from Nanos particularly of interest as well as suggestions by immigration lawyer Betsy Kane, albeit hard to implement given the various interests involved:

As politicians trade shots over who is to blame for Canada’s housing crisis, immigration lawyer Betsy Kane says “the finger-pointing” should be aimed at the schools actively recruiting “anyone and everyone who has the money to get here” without ensuring an adequate supply of student housing. Rather than capping the number of student visas, she says the government should instead tighten the criteria under which institutions are permitted to host them.  

However, NDP housing and immigration critic Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East, B.C.) says a cap would simply be more of the Liberals “tinkering around the edges” of the housing crisis, and “if they want to point fingers, they should look at themselves in the mirror,” and admit that their current housing strategy is, at best, inefficient, and, at worst, a failure.

On Aug. 21, during the Liberals’ cabinet retreat in Prince Edward Island, Housing Minister Sean Fraser (Central Nova, N.S.) suggested the federal government may need to consider a cap on its international student program, which has seen “explosive growth” since the Liberals took office in 2015. 

Currently, there are more than 807,000 international students with study permits in Canada, up from 352,330 in 2015.

“There are good private institutions out there, and separating the wheat from the chaff is going to be a big focus of the work that I try to do with [Immigration Minister Marc] Miller,” Fraser said, adding that “when you see some of these institutions that have five, six times as many students enrolled as they have spaces for them in the building … you’ve got to start to ask yourself some pretty tough questions.”

In an interview with CBC’s The House later that week, Immigration Minister Marc Miller (Ville-Marie–Le Sud-Ouest–Île-des-Soeurs, Que.) said Canada is on track to host around 900,000 international students this year, and while he did not commit to Fraser’s suggestion, he said a cap was not “the only solution to this.” 

Miller also cast blame on a number of “illegitimate actors” exploiting the system, and while he declined to “name and shame,” he said many of those actors were within the private market.

While Fraser cautioned against blaming newcomers for “housing challenges that have been several decades in the making,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, Ont.) accused the Liberals of doing just that.

“[Prime Minister Justin Trudeau] thinks if you’re afraid of your neighbours, you might forget that you can’t pay your rent. This is what demagogues do,” Poilievre said at an Aug. 23 press conference on Parliament Hill. “He wants Canadians to forget all that and blame immigrants. He wants to divide people to distract from his failings.”

Kane, vice-president of government relations with the Canadian Immigration Lawyer Association, told The Hill Times it was “a bit unfair” to blame the high number of international students for putting pressure on the housing market.

“What we’re seeing is the result of colleges and universities leveraging the International Student Program in order to capitalize on the tuition that they’re able to charge,” Kane said. “As Minister Fraser said, we need to cut ‘the wheat from the chaff’ and figure out which institutions aren’t attempting to deliver high-quality education but rather to capitalize on the higher tuition fees.”

Kane said the government could reduce the number of students in other ways, including narrowing the eligibility or designating so-called “trusted educational institutions” that can demonstrate they are delivering programming that can translate to valuable labour market skills and job opportunities.

“By culling the number of institutions and increasing the financial wherewithal students must demonstrate to qualify, you’re in essence capping the number without capping all international students,” Kane explained, adding that the government could also look to tighten further the criteria for which programs of study are eligible to receive applications by international students.

“We don’t necessarily need more international graduates with a one- or two-year business administration diploma,” Kane said. “But we do need graduates in the trades and transportation.”

Additionally, Kane said those institutions should have a greater responsibility to ensure that there is sufficient housing to accommodate students, pointing to similar responsibilities imposed on employers looking to bring in temporary foreign workers. 

Kane also noted that a cap on international students and the Liberals’ targets for new permanent residents were “two different sides of the [immigration] coin.”

“There’s always a risk of a backlash to any type of newcomer … but many of the cohort of individuals being selected as permanent residents are already here as workers and students who can demonstrate that their education, language skills, and work experience will translate into helping our economy,” Kane explained. “So what the government is saying is that in favour of letting us achieve our overall permanent immigration goals, we may have to limit the intake of our temporary residents.”

‘Collision’ between increased immigration and housing market stress ‘a major risk’ for Liberals, says pollster Nanos

While a plurality of Canadians have historically supported greater immigration, Nik Nanos, CEO and chief data scientist for Nanos Research, said that a recent survey conducted by Nanos between July 30 and Aug. 3 for Bloomberg News suggests a majority of Canadians believe increasing the annual immigration targets from 465,000 in 2023 to 500,000 by 2025 would have a negative (42 per cent) or somewhat negative (26 per cent) impact on housing prices. Only one in five believe it will have a positive (eight per cent) or somewhat positive impact (12 per cent).

“Canadians are not against immigration, but they do understand that when you bring over [400,000] to 500,000 new people into the country every year, they have to live someplace,” Nanos told The Hill Times, comparing the immigration targets to adding the population of cities like Kitchener, Ont., every year.

“These are pretty significant numbers,” Nanos continued, adding that the average Canadian doesn’t need to be an expert on immigration or housing to know that those newcomers are going to put more pressure on the market.

According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Canada needs to build 5.8 million new homes by 2030 to tackle housing affordability. The current pace of building puts the country on track to construct just 2.3 million homes by then.

“I think the collision of increasing the number of immigrants and the stress on housing is a major risk for the Liberals,” Nanos said, adding that the Liberals are primarily responsible for putting the two issues on their current path.

“The Liberals created this policy, so they have to take responsibility for the repercussions in terms of pressure on housing and other social welfare programs,” Nanos continued. “They need to work with the provinces and municipalities in order for this policy of bringing in more newcomers to work well and to have the least amount of disruption.”

‘Pointing fingers’ at newcomers, students no substitute for effective housing strategy, says NDP MP Kwan

Kwan called the apparent “change in tune” from Fraser since being sworn in “disconcerting.” While speaking to reporters outside Rideau Hall on July 26, Fraser “[urged] caution to anyone who believes the answer to our housing challenges is to close the door on newcomers.” Kwan said that trying to divert blame to any one group in need of housing is not the solution. 

“The problem is not new people; the problem is the government and a lack of programs and measures that need to be in place to provide housing to both Canadians and newcomers alike,” Kwan said. “Unless [the Liberals] face the music and admit what they are doing is deficient, and in some cases a complete failure, we’re going to keep having this problem.”

However, it is not just the current Liberal government that Kwan says bears responsibility for the current housing crisis, pointing to the actions of consecutive governments of both stripes in the early 1990s—first the Progressive Conservative government under Brian Mulroney and then Jean Chrétien’s Liberals—who began reducing spending on housing, and cut the federal co-operative housing program before eventually pulling the plug on building any new affordable housing units entirely.

Rather than capping the number of international students admitted into the country every year, Kwan said the government should require universities and colleges to provide affordable student housing.

“We know that international students pay exorbitant fees to apply and then pay a significant amount more in tuition fees,” Kwan said, noting the schools had come to rely on that source of income due to a lack of sufficient funding from the provinces.

Kwan said the federal government should play an equal partner with the provinces and schools in funding those student accommodations, and also suggested the Liberals could tie the number of permits an institution could receive to the number of homes they can actually provide.

However, Kwan said that would simply be more “tinkering around the edges” of the problem.

“What we need is the government to deliver on a real housing plan, and that means taking bold action to make real investments,” Kwan said, noting that the federal auditor general’s November 2022 report on the National Housing Strategy provided “riches of embarrassment.” 

She also pointed to testimony from CMHC president Romy Bowers at a Dec. 5, 2022, House Human Resources, Skills, and Social Development Committee meeting, where Bowers said the CMHC’s goal of all Canadians having a “home they can afford and [that] meets their needs” by 2030 is “aspirational.”

“It’s like our moonshot. It’s like our North Star that guides our activity. It’s likely that we’re not going to achieve it, but we feel that there’s a lot of value in trying for it,” Bowers told the committee.

Kwan said if that was Canada’s approach to homelessness and the housing crisis, “it isn’t a wonder that we’re failing.”

“[The NDP] is calling on the government to build more social housing, co-op housing, and community housing that once upon a time was built by the federal government, and we need to get back to doing that,” Kwan said, noting that building was only half of the solution. 

The second half would require increased efforts to safeguard the dwindling stock that Canada has left.

“Canada is losing low-cost rental housing stock to financialized landlords, buying up low-cost rental apartments only to subsequently reno- or demo-evict the current tenants,” Kwan explained, pointing to a recent study by Steve Pomeroy, a housing research consultant and senior research fellow in the Centre for Urban Research and Education at Carleton University. 

Pomeroy’s study found that while the National Housing Strategy included plans to build 16,000 new affordable units per year, four existing units were lost for every unit built. 

“We can’t build fast enough if that rate of loss is allowed to continue,” Kwan said. “We have to stop the bleeding.” 

The NDP is calling on the federal government to create an acquisition fund for non-profits to hold existing stock in a land trust in perpetuity, as well as a moratorium on acquiring those units by “financialized landlords.” Kwan said that Canada could follow the lead of nations like New Zealand that have introduced mortgage “escalators” that increase the required down payment on second and third homes, which would also have the added benefit of levelling the playing field for first-time home buyers.

“To fix the housing crisis, the right to housing needs to be principal, and the government needs to ensure they have a plan commensurate with that to deliver,” Kwan continued. “Minister Fraser said everything is on the table, and there’s no rock he won’t turn … how about tackling the hard stuff and not tinkering around the edges?”

Source: ‘Culling’ bad actors capitalizing on tuition fees more effective than capping student visas in bid to fix housing crisis: immigration lawyer

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A million more non-permanent residents live in Canada than official figures, ministers told

2023/08/31 2 Comments

Believe Mikal Skuterud signalled this earlier but heightens another impact on housing. And unlike the USA, Canada does not track visa overstays, a gap that should be filled:

A leading economist warned federal ministers at their cabinet retreat last week that there are around one million more non-permanent residents living in Canada, including foreign students, than government estimates suggest.

The warning came in a briefing from Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC Capital Markets. He told the Liberal government gathering in Charlottetown that the undercounting in the official statistics means Canada is underestimating the number of new homes required to meet the country’s increasing housing needs.

Mr. Tal said in an interview that the government estimate of the number of non-permanent residents in the country in 2021 was around one million. But his analysis found there were closer to two million. The main reason for the discrepancy, he said, is that the government is not counting people who remain in the country after their visas expire.

Mr. Tal said Statistics Canada assumes that temporary resident visa holders, including international students, leave the country 30 days after the expiries of their visas. “Their software, their coding, makes the assumption that 30 days after your visa expired you left the country, despite the fact you have not left the country,” he said.

He said a majority of temporary residents don’t leave in this timeframe, and many apply to extend their stays in Canada.

In a report on his findings, published Wednesday, Mr. Tal says “the practical implication of that undercounting is that the housing affordability crisis Canada is facing is actually worse than perceived, and calls for an even more urgent and aggressive policy action.”

The federal government has increased its immigration targets to historically high levels. It is now aiming to admit about 500,000 new permanent residents this year, and in each of the following two years. But those numbers don’t include foreign students on visas or people on temporary work permits.

There is currently no federal limit on the number of student visas issued each year. At last week’s cabinet retreat, Housing Minister Sean Fraser told reporters the government should consider a cap on the program, which he said has seen “explosive growth” and placed pressure on housing markets.

The high cost of renting and buying housing has become a fraught political issue. The federal Conservatives have argued that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals need to do more to address housing shortages.

Mr. Tal told The Globe and Mail that Statistics Canada’s practice of assuming holders of expired visas leave the country after 30 days accounts for only about 750,000 of the million or so non-permanent residents he estimates are absent from official numbers.

Another 250,000 – mostly international students – are missing from census data, he said. The most recent census forms said students should submit their information if they were living in their main residences. But they were told not to fill out the census if they return home to live with their parents during the year.

Mr. Tal said the system was confusing for students, and that not all of them filled in the census, in some cases because they believed their main residences were abroad.

“This is why even Statistics Canada believes that the census continues to undercount NPRs with valid visas in Canada,” he said, using an abbreviation for non-permanent residents.

He said the shortfall in the census has implications for housing policy, because the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, the federal Crown corporation responsible for housing, uses census data to make its forecasts, which are widely relied upon by planners throughout Canada.

“If your starting point is too low, your forecast will be far too low, resulting in a suboptimal planning process,” Mr. Tal said.

His report on the findings says its figures are conservative.

A briefing paper by Henry Lotin, the founder of Integrative Trade and Economics and a former federal economist, agrees with Mr. Tal’s findings. It says “upwards of one million persons are missing in the official population, largely due to expired visa holders remaining in Canada awaiting new visas.”

Statistics Canada should change its counting methodologies to include holders of expired visas, Mr. Lotin’s paper says.

Source: A million more non-permanent residents live in Canada than official figures, ministers told

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Beaudry: Au-delà des chiffres sur le français et les étudiants étrangers

2023/08/31 Leave a comment

Useful reminder that Quebec francisation policies are harder for PhD students:

Les étudiants étrangers font la manchette : on leur attribue divers maux de notre société, du déclin du français à la crise du logement. Mais plutôt qu’alimenter la guerre de chiffres que se livre différentes factions en matière d’immigration, ce texte relatera plutôt une belle histoire de volonté et de résilience.

En matière de francisation, la réalité des études supérieures contraste avec celle des études de premier cycle. À l’instar de plusieurs universités en Europe et ailleurs, la pression pour donner les cours et faire la recherche en anglais est très forte.

Bien que ce ne soit pas la mission de nos universités de franciser les étudiants allophones, rendre plus flexibles nos programmes d’études supérieures pour leur permettre de suivre de vrais cours de francisation est nécessaire, puisqu’avantageux pour tous. Mais cela prend du temps et de l’argent. Faire son doctorat et suivre des cours de francisation en même temps relève du parcours du combattant.

À Polytechnique, comme dans beaucoup d’autres institutions, le doctorat à temps partiel n’existe pas : il faut franchir à vive allure toutes les étapes dans les temps impartis. Si nous voulons contribuer à l’intégration des personnes étudiantes que nous accueillons et formons, nous devons repenser ces premières années des programmes d’études supérieures.

Ce temps supplémentaire exerce aussi une pression énorme sur les fonds de recherche des universitaires qui appuient ces personnes pendant une plus longue période d’études.

À Polytechnique, j’enseigne en français. Un de mes étudiants de doctorat dont le français se résumait à « bonjour » s’inquiétait de ne pas pouvoir suivre les cours et bien comprendre la matière. Pour les cours du trimestre d’hiver 2022, nous nous sommes donc tournés vers la technologie pour pallier son manque de compréhension du français. Il a installé une application sur son téléphone cellulaire qui traduit de façon simultanée la langue parlée. Une des oreillettes était placée sur mon bureau (elle servait alors de micro) et il avait l’autre dans l’oreille (où étaient diffusées mes paroles traduites en anglais). Le texte traduit en anglais défilait aussi sur son téléphone, avec un petit délai différent de celui de la voix en anglais. Ce n’était pas parfait, mais il estime que 60 % de la traduction était compréhensible et correcte. En plus de cet équipement mal synchronisé, il a traduit en anglais tous les documents et présentations de ses cours du trimestre.

À l’été 2022, je lui ai demandé pourquoi il n’était jamais disponible avant 14 h. J’ai déjà eu des étudiants lève-tard et des oiseaux de nuit, mais si tard, je trouvais cela curieux. Il m’a avoué candidement et un peu honteux que depuis novembre 2021, il était inscrit à temps plein aux cours de francisation pour les personnes immigrantes et qu’il devait être en classe de 8 h à 13 h, et ce, tous les jours de la semaine.

Me voyant bouche bée, il m’a expliqué que, pour comprendre la réalité des personnes immigrantes au Québec, de façon à bien cerner cette dimension de son sujet de recherche, il devait se mettre dans leurs souliers. Il faut dire que sa thèse porte sur le rôle de l’immigration qualifiée et des étudiants étrangers sur la collaboration internationale en science, technologie et innovation.

Depuis le début de ma carrière de professeure, certains de mes étudiants ont bien suivi quelques cours de français ici et là au cours de leurs études — avec des résultats très mitigés, pour être honnête. Mais personne ne s’était encore prêté à cet exercice intense en plus de ses études doctorales.

Nous avons dû planifier l’examen doctoral et la présentation de sa proposition de thèse, qu’il a réussi avec brio, entre deux modules de cours de francisation. Avec la permission de son école de francisation, il faisait une pause pour reprendre lors du prochain module (dont la durée est d’environ huit semaines). Au moment où j’écris ces lignes, il ne lui reste que deux modules de cours de francisation à terminer, mais toute mon équipe de recherche l’encourage, converse avec lui en français et est fière de ses progrès.

S’astreindre chaque jour à cinq heures de cours de français, en plus des devoirs à faire le soir, des présentations orales à préparer, sans compter les cours de la scolarité doctorale, les travaux et les articles à lire en préparation de la proposition de thèse, représente une tâche titanesque.

Serez-vous surpris d’apprendre que cet étudiant a non seulement réussi avec succès son examen doctoral et présenté sa proposition de thèse, mais qu’il a aussi remporté l’une des prestigieuses bourses Vanier que le Canada offre à des étudiants exceptionnels et déterminés ? Félicitations, Amirali !

Plutôt qu’être un handicap pour les universités francophones, ce début un peu plus lent des études doctorales devrait être considéré comme un avantage qui rend nos diplômés plus attrayants dans un milieu très compétitif. Autant nos étudiants et futurs diplômés, leur famille, leur société d’accueil et les universités francophones en bénéficient.

Donnons-nous les moyens de remplir cette mission sociétale correctement.

Source: Au-delà des chiffres sur le français et les étudiants étrangers

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Keller: How to fix a broken foreign student visa system? Send it back to school 

2023/08/30 Leave a comment

Yet more commentary from Keller, this time on international students. Valid criticisms but hard to see how any government, federal or provincial, would have the political courage to implement even if they should take significant steps in that direction, starting with caps and gradually eliminating the “visa mills” of the private colleges and the public institutions that work with them:

Marc Miller, the new federal immigration minister, gets it. Whether he plans to fix it; whether the Prime Minister’s Office is interested in fixing it; and whether the provinces will help all remain to be seen.

The “it” is Canada’s student visa program. Its defects and side effects have been getting a lot of attention, mostly in relation to housing prices. The fact that more than 800,000 visa students were in Canada last year, compared to fewer than 200,000 a decade and a half ago, is one of many contributors to a growing mismatch between housing demand and supply. It’s not discriminatory to point this out. It’s just math.

But in an interview last Saturday with CBC Radio’s The House, Mr. Miller said there are issues at stake that are bigger than housing. He’s right.

He described the international student recruitment system as an “ecosystem” that is “very lucrative” but has brought “some perverse effects: some fraud in the system, some people taking advantage of what is seen as a backdoor entry into Canada.”

He said that the larger issue is “the integrity of the system.”

Bingo. Canadians want an immigration system that benefits and enriches Canada. It’s become obvious that part of the student visa program, maybe even most of it, is no longer hitting the target or even aiming at it.

As I said in my last column, the Trudeau government broke the immigration system by enabling a massive shadow immigration stream of temporary foreign workers, many now coming through student visas. And Ottawa had help: from private industry lobbying for an all-you-can-eat buffet of minimum-wage labour; from educational institutions with dollar signs in their eyes; and from provincial governments that saw an opportunity to put their higher education budgets on a diet, with foreign student tuition making up the difference.

The leader on that last account has been Ontario. Between 2000 and 2022, its number of foreign students rose from 46,000 to 412,000. The rise under the Doug Ford government has been especially vertiginous, and particularly pronounced in the college sector. In 2016, fewer than 35,000 new student visas were issued to attend Ontario colleges. Last year, the number was more than 143,000.

A lot of those students are at suburban strip-mall academies or office park “campuses.” Some are run by private entrepreneurs. Others are the product of entrepreneurial arrangements between public colleges and private operators, with the former providing the credentials and latter just about everything else.

What is being sold in many cases is not world-class education, but the right to come to Canada, to work while enrolled, to continue working after graduation and to move up the line for citizenship.

And at around $15,000 a year for an Ontario college credential, that’s selling Canadian citizenship at fire sale prices.

The road to citizenship via higher education – genuine education, of a genuinely higher level – is a path our immigration system should always be eager to promote.

When a foreign graduate in, for example, engineering, is given a student visa to do a master’s degree at, say, the University of Alberta, and after their studies they choose to remain in Canada, this country wins.

Our student visa system is supposed to be a pipeline of people who are more educated and skilled than the average Canadian, making them likely to be more economically productive than the average Canadian.

The student visa system is not supposed to be a route to come here to flip burgers, stock shelves or deliver Instacart.

Canada should be maximizing the number of high-skill, high-wage immigrants, and minimizing the number of low-skill, low-wage immigrants. A sensibly run student visa system would be entirely about the former. Instead, a big chunk of it is now about the latter.

How to fix that?

The first thing Ottawa should do is cap the number of student visas. Mr. Miller said this year’s tally will be around 900,000. He should cap future intake well below that.

Next, create a system to prioritize who gets the limited supply of visas. Some in higher education have suggested that can’t be done, but every university and college has a system to do something similar, year after year. It’s called the admissions department. If there are only 500 places in the medical school, the school has to figure out who are the best 500 to admit.

A spokesman for Mr. Miller told me that the department is having “exploratory discussions” about creating a “trusted institutions” framework, which would look more favourably on educational institutions meeting a “higher standard” in areas such as “international student supports and outcomes.”

To govern is to choose. The highest quality and highest value programs should get the visas.

Some provinces will scream, notably Ontario. It underfunds public colleges relative to other provinces, by leaning heavily on foreign student tuition. But at Ontario colleges, foreign students are paying surprisingly low tuition fees. The price is generally far below university tuition. It can rise.

Ottawa should also end the right to work in Canada while in school. Or at least restrict it to high-wage work. Make it so that a Canadian education is the reason a foreign student is coming to Canada, not the pretext.

Source: How to fix a broken foreign student visa system? Send it back to school

Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

Sun Editorial: Federal policies made housing crisis inevitable

2023/08/30 Leave a comment

Recognizes role that provinces also play:

The way the Trudeau government talks about Canada’s affordable housing crisis, it’s as if the rapidly increasing number of international students and immigrants it’s admitting to Canada every year snuck up on it.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberals came to power in 2015, Canada accepted 352,325 international students.

This year, according to Immigration Minister Marc Miller, the number will be about 900,000.

Miller told CBC’s The House on Saturday this isn’t just contributing to Canada’s affordable housing crisis, but also creating problems with “the integrity of the system, that has mushroomed, ballooned in the past couple of years.”

Now add the fact that when the Liberals came to power in 2015, 271,845 immigrants became permanent residents of Canada.

The Trudeau government’s plan is to boost that number to 465,000 this year, 485,000 in 2024 and to 500,000 in 2025.

Three Canadian banks have warned the federal government’s policy is misguided.

TD Bank said “continuing with a high-growth immigration strategy could widen the housing shortfall by about a half-million units within just two years.”

National Bank of Canada said “the federal government’s decision to open the immigration floodgates during the most aggressive monetary tightening cycle in a generation has created a record imbalance between housing and demand.”

BMO said “heightened immigration flows designed to ease labour supply pressure immediately add to the housing demand they are trying to meet.”

The Trudeau government says it’s wrong to blame international students — on whom it may be considering a cap on admissions — and immigrants for Canada’s housing crisis.

Of course they’re not to blame.

The government is to blame for increasing their numbers so rapidly, with no coherent plan to house them, consistent with Trudeau’s view that “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility. It’s not something that we have direct carriage of.”

To be fair, provincial and municipal governments share responsibility for housing with the federal government, which also says we need high immigration levels because of our low domestic birth rate to bolster the economy, including having sufficient workers to build homes.

But what’s also true is that issues the federal government has direct carriage of — immigration and international students — are contributing to Canada’s affordable housing crisis.

Source: EDITORIAL: Federal policies made housing crisis inevitable

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Chinese students frustrated by lengthy security checks as school year nears

2023/08/30 Leave a comment

Of note:

Some Chinese international students say their study permits have been tied up in security screenings, leaving them in the lurch for months after being admitted to Canadian universities.

Yunze Lu, a master’s student in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Ottawa, has already completed a year of coursework online and successfully applied to the school’s co-op program.

“I have a very simple and clear background. It’s OK to be checked, but I don’t think it needs to be checked for so long,” he said.

“It makes me feel they are doing nothing but just don’t care about my application, just throw it away.”

Lu said he didn’t even know his application was under security review by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) until he filed an access to information request to the CBSA to find out more about his file.

Through social media, he has now connected with other frustrated study permit applicants, some of whom spoke to CBC News.

‘This is unfair to all of us’

Xinli Guo has also been waiting months for the study permit that will allow him to take up an offer from the U of O’s master’s program in systems engineering.

“This is unfair to all of us,” he said.

Through proactively tracking his file, Guo helped resolve an issue with a financial document and learned that he’d been placed under security review in May.

“I don’t think I deserve a security check because I don’t have anything related with Canadians’ national security. I’m just a normal student going to study engineering courses in Canada,” he said.

Given the delay, Guo is worried he’ll lose his admission offer and could miss the opportunity to apply to study in other countries.

In a statement, the University of Ottawa said it’s aware of students from “many countries” facing visa issues and is working to develop contingencies.

The university says it continues to advocate for a fair, efficient and transparent immigration system that allows students to plan their future with confidence.

In a statement, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said China is one of the top sources for international students and the department is receiving a record number of applications.

Since January 2021, there have been nearly 181,000 study permit applications from China. Of those, 1,832 have not been processed.

“All study permit applications from around the world are assessed equally and against the same criteria, regardless of the country of origin,” IRCC said.

“Security screening is one, but not the only, factor that can result in higher processing times.”

The department said processing times vary on a case-by-case basis depending on complexity, responses for additional information and the ease of verifying the application’s content.

According to the department’s website, a study permit should take about seven weeks.

Delays ‘problematic,’ immigration lawyer says

Will Tao, an immigration lawyer at Vancouver’s Heron Law Offices, said the worsening geopolitical situation between China and Canada may be combining with the increasing use of algorithms to contribute to a rise in certain files being caught in review delays.

“Grad students working in the computer science/tech space, and especially folks with government experience or with parents that are in the government, those are the ones that are being flagged in our experience,” he said.

“It’s very, very problematic how this has become almost a predictive analytics exercise.”

Tao said applicants from Iran, another country with fraught geopolitical relations, have faced similar screening delays. He said while he understands there is a national security need for screening, and international diplomacy complicates the issue, students are being left uncertain about their futures due to the lack of transparency.

“They could be pursuing other stuff or going to other countries,” Tao said.

More Chinese visa applicants are resorting to using mandamus applications in court to compel a government decision, he said. The applications are used to compel IRCC to issue decisions in a timely fashion after considerable delays.

Chinese applicants account for 12 per cent of mandamus applications, second only to India and just ahead of Iran, according to Tao’s analysis of IRCC data.

Source: Chinese students frustrated by lengthy security checks as school year nears

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Porter Robbins: How Immigrant-Friendly Is Canada?

2023/08/30 Leave a comment

Lacks historical perspective and international comparisons with rather shallow take on immigration and multiculturalism:

Canadians like to think of their country as a nation built on immigration. Canada, the story goes, is a bastion of multiculturalism. This narrative has been refined through smug comparison to the United States and other Western countries. At first glance, it may seem that Canada is more welcoming: While other Western nations have faced heavy criticism for their migration policies, Canada has garnered a reputation as being immigrant-friendly. Since 2019, the Canadian government has resettled more refugees than any other country, with little public backlash.

So in November, when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a plan to expand immigration, it seemed like a politically savvy move. Since Trudeau took office in 2015, immigration has already increased from around 300,000 to 400,000 new residents per year. Now, Canada plans to welcome 500,000 permanent residents each year by 2025. Laid out as a way to build up the Canadian economy, which faces labor shortages and a declining birth rate, the plan prioritizes bringing in skilled immigrants. It was met with praise from major corporate advocacy groups, such as the Business Council of Canada.

Ten months later, Trudeau’s plan is facing skepticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Criticism from the far right is no surprise. But as the government has struggled to integrate and support migrants, the prospect of bringing in significantly more of them has led immigration experts and advocates to air grievances about what they see as the administration’s failings in related sectors, notably refugee resettlement and housing.

Meanwhile, public opinion on immigration has started to shift. As cost of living and housing prices stay stubbornly high, anti-immigration sentiment—long boiling—may rise to the surface.

In early 2019, controversy arose over billboards put up across the country with the slogan “Say No to Mass Immigration,” which promoted then-MP Maxime Bernier’s far-right People’s Party of Canada in the campaign for the upcoming federal election. Complaints and citizens’ petitions ultimately led the advertising company to take down the signs.

Those who complained about the billboards, including candidates from Canada’s center and left-wing parties, saw their removal as a victory for Canadian pluralism, thrown into relief by then-U.S. President Donald Trump’s xenophobic, anti-migrant policies to the south. On election day in 2019, Trudeau’s Liberal Party triumphed, while Bernier’s party received meager support.

The Liberals’ success, combined with the outcry over the far right’s weaponization of immigration, signaled to Trudeau that most Canadian voters were resolutely pro-migration. Polling seemed to back this up. The month before the election, the Environics Institute for Survey Research found that 85 percent of Canadians surveyed agreed that immigration has a positive effect on the economy, while 69 percent supported the current immigration rate.

Yet these figures obscured Canada’s long-standing challenges with diversity and inclusion. “Because Canada is pro-immigration, there’s a perception that conflates this with Canada being an open society and not being racist,” said Pallavi Banerjee, a sociologist at the University of Calgary who researches how discrimination affects young migrants’ futures.

Canada has a history of racist policies related to immigration, from the late-19th-century Chinese head tax, which forced Chinese immigrants to pay a fee when entering the country, to Quebec’s highly controversial Bill 21, a law passed in 2019 that prohibits the display of religious symbols from public servants’ attire, including crosses, turbans, kippahs, and hijabs. In one high-profile incident in 2021, Bill 21 led to the removal of a Muslim teacher from her classroom for wearing a hijab.

In a 2022 Environics survey, 46 percent of respondents agreed that “there are too many immigrants coming into this country who are not adopting Canadian values.” The term “Canadian values,” though vague, points to respondents’ desire for immigrants to assimilate. The same poll has been conducted for three decades, and while that figure has decreased from 72 percent in 1993, it still indicates that Canada has yet to fully embrace multiculturalism.

Even at current immigration levels, Banerjee said, migrants are segregated from established Canadians, limiting opportunities for them to integrate into the social fabric of their new country and thrive. According to Statistics Canada as of 2021, 41.8 percent of nonpermanent residents and 16.1 percent of immigrants who moved to Canada in the past five years lived in poverty.

The government’s failure to fully integrate newcomers has spurred skepticism of Trudeau’s new program on the left. Columnists for center and left-wing outlets have writtenthat Canada has an “immigration elephant in the room,” referring to racism against newcomers, and that the country is “woefully unprepared for the coming immigration boom” due to funding cuts for newcomer settlement organizations, which are typically funded through a combination of federal, provincial, and private donor funds.

Advocates for refugees and other migrants are some of the loudest voices demanding reform to Canada’s immigration and settlement processes before expansion. Directors of settlement and refugee organizations, who may have otherwise endorsed Trudeau’s plans, say the system is already overloaded. Newcomers categorized as “highly skilled” have publicly complained about being stuck in a bureaucratic limbo with the immigration ministry and not receiving decisions on their residency permits for years.

Public opinion appears to have shifted as well. Even before Trudeau’s plan, anti-immigration sentiment was already worsening online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Banerjee said, as some Canadians blamed immigrants, particularly those of Asian descent, for the spread of the disease. In July, David Coletto, CEO of Canada’s Abacus polling firm, wrote on his Substack that 61 percent of Canadians polled believe that 500,000 immigrants per year is too high, including 37 percent who feel it is “way too high.” In addition, a July Abacus survey found that four in 10 Canadians polled would vote for a politician who promised to reduce immigration levels.

Now, some Canadians are conflating a different issue with immigration: the housing crisis that Trudeau has been unable to stem in his nearly eight-year tenure. In the many think pieces about immigration, commentators have complained of already overburdened services, from health care wait times to the availability of language lessons. But the most common criticism of Trudeau’s plan to expand immigration is the lack of affordable housing.

“Canada doesn’t have a refugee problem. Canada has a housing problem,” said Francesca Allodi-Ross, who runs Romero House, a nongovernmental organization in Toronto that connects migrants with people who have spare rooms. She worries about newcomers being blamed for a housing shortage that has been a long time coming.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Canada has the most expensivehousing market in the G-7. Vacancy rates for rental housing are at a two-decade low, and the Royal Bank of Canada expects the country’s rental housing gap (the difference between available rental units and those seeking them) to surpass 120,000 by 2026—quadrupling today’s deficit. In early August, Stefane Marion, the chief economist of the National Bank, called on the government to revise the immigration target until housing supply could match demand, citing “record imbalance” between the two.

Meanwhile, as housing shortages threaten to affect the coming “highly skilled” migrants prioritized by Trudeau’s plan, social justice-oriented groups such as Romero House have pointed out that the government has so far neglected to provide enough housing for other newcomers who have already arrived: specifically, refugees and asylum-seekers. The government’s failure to arrange temporary housing for them was glaringly apparent over the summer, when hundreds of asylum-seekers campedoutside Toronto’s emergency shelter intake center.

The way the government responds to the needs of newcomers, and especially refugees, is “very reactive—and it’s been this way for years,” Allodi-Ross said. It was only after the Toronto shelter crisis, when many media commentators questioned Trudeau’s immigration expansion program, that the municipal, provincial, and federal government committed $71.4 million to housing for refugees and asylum-seekers, and the city freed up more hotels for emergency shelter.

Directors of temporary shelters and refugee settlement programs say there is a chronic lack of state funding and support for recent arrivals. John Mtshede, the executive director of Matthew House, a shelter for asylum-seekers in Ontario’s Niagara region, said his shelter is stretched to capacity. For years, the government has repeatedly denied Matthew House’s requests for funding to develop a plot of land for additional housing. Matthew House has found its most sustainable support through private fundraising and religious groups, rather than government funding.

Like many others who work at refugee and immigration NGOs, Mtshede is frustrated with the lack of coordination between the municipal, provincial, and federal governments about who bears responsibility for housing the government’s target of a little more than 70,000 new refugees each year. “Nobody wants to take the blame for this situation,” he said.

Despite the pushback, the Liberal government appears to be doubling down and ignoring accusations that it has not funded the services required to process and settle newcomers. At a press conference in early August, a reporter asked Marc Miller, the new immigration minister, if the government would reduce the immigration targets.

“Whether we revise them upwards or not is something that I have to look at,” he said. “But certainly, I don’t think we’re in any position of wanting to lower them by any stretch of the imagination.” In the meantime, newcomers will increasingly become the fall guy for the housing crisis that has unfolded under Trudeau’s watch.

Claire Porter Robbins is a journalist in Calgary, Alberta, and the founder of Btchcoin News. She has worked as an aid worker in the Middle East and in strategic communications for a United Nations peacekeeping mission.

Source: How Immigrant-Friendly Is Canada?

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Barutciski: Canada’s overly inclusive definition of ‘immigrant’ threatens to upset the apple cart 

2023/08/29 Leave a comment

Fully agree with need to include temporary residents in the annual levels plan but no need for the government to await an amendment to IRPA: in the interim, the government could decide to do so on its own volition if inclined to do so and be more transparent about actual levels of immigration.

Likely inertia will prevail, nothing will be done by the government and no amendment to IRPA will come before Parliament. Happy to be proven wrong…:

That Canadians have been debating aspects of immigration policy this summer is, on its own, unusual. After years of record-setting admission numbers, systemic problems such as the generalized housing shortage and the surge of homeless asylum seekers have prompted debates about whether the number of admissions is too high – though admirably, Canada’s traditional widespread openness and commitment to immigration remains unquestioned. But what’s also unusual is the way we are talking about immigrants, because official and media sources have presented the yearly number of immigrants to the country in a way that hasn’t been as clear and upfront as possible about recent changes in immigration policy.

In the past, the term “immigrant” was generally used to designate permanent residents who had been admitted to the country. As a consequence, Canadians had grown accustomed over the past few decades to hearing that their country was admitting roughly 200,000 to 400,000 immigrants a year. In March, however, then-immigration minister Sean Fraser announced that Canada had brought in a million new immigrants in the previous year. While the sudden huge increase was largely unexplained, careful observers figured it out: the new statistics included temporary residents, such as international students, along with the usual permanent resident numbers.

This has stemmed from an explosion in the granting of temporary resident permits since the Liberals came to power in 2015. The Liberals were also still able to issue a large number of permanent-resident permits during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the borders were closed, by relying on the selection of temporary residents who were already in Canada. This approach is becoming the new way of selecting many of the country’s permanent residents.

In other words, temporary migrants already have become a significant part of the country’s immigration policy; the data has just caught up with that reality. The problem is that nobody has actually explained this major change to the host population. The implications need to be discussed openly and honestly, and it is impossible to do so if the relevant information is not made public.

According to s. 94 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the immigration minister is supposed to provide Parliament with a report that explains many details focusing on the permanent residents who are admitted every year. This provision is now incomplete given this shift in reporting basic statistics. Parliamentarians should amend the legislation so that Canadians can be properly informed not only about permanent residents, but also temporary residents.

All opposition parties should push for this amendment. The Liberals have somewhat downplayed their role in the evolving language, maintaining that temporary permits depend on demand from employers and postsecondary institutions. Yet the federal government ultimately controls the authorization and issuance of visas. If employers looking for cheap labour and cash-strapped educational institutions really are able to guide the country’s immigration policy based on their own narrow interests, that would disregard the implications for the rest of the country.

There seems to be an ideological dimension to the shift, and it has been implemented in a way that goes beyond the traditional consensus amongst Canadians. When she was foreign affairs minister, Chrystia Freeland illustrated this vision when she rushed to Toronto’s Pearson Airport in 2019 to greet the newly arrived asylum seeker Rahaf Mohammed. Her characterization of the Saudi teenager that day as a “brave new Canadian” was technically premature if we go by the country’s Citizenship Act. Some have similarly started to refer to asylum seekers as “newcomers,” even though in most cases, their ultimate status and right to remain in Canada is unknown. This generous use of inclusive terminology regarding community membership is not understood by average Canadians, and threatens to upset the informal agreement that positively informs our politics: that immigration enriches Canada.

All these changes to Canada’s immigration policy may represent potentially interesting new ideas, but they need to be clearly presented and debated to keep the public on board. Marc Miller, who took over for Mr. Fraser as Immigration Minister in July, would be wise to proceed cautiously and reassure Canadians that their country is not being transformed too quickly by the improvised and ad hoc application of new concepts. The place of temporary permits in the overall immigration scheme provides one important example where recent developments need to be properly scrutinized. An amendment to Canada’s immigration legislation is needed to make sure this happens.

Michael Barutciski is a faculty member of York University’s Glendon College. He teaches law and policy with a focus on migration issues.

Source: Canada’s overly inclusive definition of ‘immigrant’ threatens to upset the apple cart

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Mahboubi: Canada’s underemployed economic immigrants: How to stop wasting talent

2023/08/29 Leave a comment

Usual list of factors and issues. Regulated profession credential recognition is under provincial jurisdiction and that is where some of the movement is. Was always amused when at IRCC foreign credential recognition that appeared to me as all process with little substance.

And if economic principal immigrants are largely not using settlement services, the government needs to understand why and make necessary program adjustments (or just accept that for most economic immigrants, these services may be less necessary).

Would be nice if IRCC would publish settlement services on open data!

Canada consistently fails to fully utilize immigrants’ skills, limiting its efforts to address labour-market needs and imposing a loss on the economy.

Economic immigration is Canada’s largest and most popular admission category. To make such immigration more responsive to labour-market needs, Canada recently launched category-based selection that prioritizes in-demand occupations facing shortages, such as those in health care and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

However, once they get to Canada, foreign-educated immigrants, particularly recent immigrants, often encounter difficulties finding employment that aligns with their qualifications, and experience persistent skills underutilization. This phenomenon exists even among immigrants in targeted occupations in category-based selection, limiting the benefit of immigrants’ influx in those occupations.

According to Statistics Canada, more than 25 per cent of all immigrants (aged 25-64) with a foreign bachelor’s degree or higher worked in occupations requiring only a high-school diploma or less in 2021.

Earlier evidence from 2016 also shows that only two in five economic immigrants with a health-related degree worked in health-related occupations. The mismatch rate is also high among immigrants with a degree in the STEMfields (more than 50 per cent).

While admitting more immigrants in targeted occupations can help combat some chronic labour shortages, addressing underutilization issues is far more critical.

Obstacles that prevent economic immigrants from fully utilizing their skills include regulatory, language and cultural barriers, nonrecognition of foreign credentials and work experience, lack of Canadian experience, and discrimination.

To better integrate economic immigrants, provincial governments need to work with regulatory bodies to streamline foreign-credential and work-experience recognition. Some provinces are already moving in the right direction. For example, eight provinces offer practice-ready assessment programs for internationally trained family physicians.

But although this program can help speed up the credential recognition process, it is not open to all physicians and the number of assessments seems to be low, failing to keep pace with demand: Only 50 applicants will be accepted this year in Ontario. Provinces should expand this program based on the outcome evaluation and consider a similar program for other regulatory professions.

Provinces can also learn best practices from abroad. For example, Australia offers four assessment pathways for international medical graduates to register to practice. It has also taken several actions to reduce red tape and to streamline and expedite the assessment and registration process. The changesinclude increasing senior staff and cutting the processing time for initial risk assessments, fast-tracking admission of practitioners from trusted countries, and reviewing standards and requirements.

Professional Engineers Ontario recently removed the requirement of Canadian work experience for qualified foreign engineers. This change is a welcome strategy for other regulatory professions and other provinces to follow.

In addition, investing more in bridging programs such as Canada Work Experience that connects immigrants with experienced professionals in their respective fields through experiential learning, internship, or unlicensed opportunities helps immigrants understand the local job market. It also allows them to learn the workplace culture and gain Canadian experiences and new skills.

Governments need to support programs focusing on employability skills and develop targeted job-matching programs to facilitate connections between employers seeking skilled workers and immigrants looking for opportunities. They also need to educate employers on the benefits of hiring immigrants and encourage employers to hire recent immigrants.

A McKinsey report found that organizations with more ethnic and cultural diversity are 36 per cent more likely to outperform their competitors in profitability. According to a Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council’s survey, 80 per cent of GTA employers who intentionally hire immigrants noticed a positive impact on their organization.

Raising awareness of, enhancing access to, and encouraging participation in employment services, language learning resources and bridging programs helpprovide better and faster labour-market integration of newcomers. Between 2016 and 2020, only 8.5 per cent of economic principle applicants accessed federally funded employment and community connection programs, far less than other immigrant groups.

According to a survey in 2021, only 8 to 9 per cent of skilled newcomers who used employment services learned firsthand about the available services from government offices (e.g., upon arrival at the border). The federal government needs to actively reach out to newcomers, educate them about employment assistance services and improve the usage of prearrival employment services.

As Canada plans to attract more skilled immigrants to fill gaps in the labour force and support the economy, better use of their skills and integration of this talent are becoming more crucial. Their prosperity means generations of benefits to come.

Parisa Mahboubi is a senior policy analyst at the C. D. Howe Institute, where Tingting Zhang is a junior policy analyst.

Source: Canada’s underemployed economic immigrants: How to stop wasting talent

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

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