Un système surchargé fait rater la rentrée à des étudiants en francisation 

2023/08/26 Leave a comment

    Service delivery failure despite priority on francisation:

    Depuis son ouverture, le 1er juin dernier, Francisation Québec fait face à un achalandage record : en moins de trois mois, près de 30 000 immigrants se sont inscrits sur ce nouveau guichet unique, a appris Le Devoir. Or, croulant sous la tâche, le ministère de l’Immigration peine à répondre à la demande — et près de 95 % des nouveaux inscrits ne vivront pas de rentrée scolaire ces jours-ci.

    Selon les données fournies par le ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration (MIFI), des 23 500 détenteurs d’un dossier jugé complet, seuls 1500 peuvent s’asseoir sur les bancs d’école. Quelque 3500 autres qui n’ont pas encore de date de début de cours devraient par contre se joindre à eux ces prochaines semaines, assure le ministère.

    Au centre de francisation Louis-Jolliet, à Québec, à peine 200 nouveaux étudiants à temps complet et à temps partiel pourront commencer leurs cours prochainement. L’établissement pourra toutefois franciser son nombre habituel d’étudiants grâce à la réinscription d’environ 1000 étudiants qui avaient déjà suivi des cours et qui évoluaient dans l’ancien système, avant Francisation Québec. « Si je n’avais pas eu mon bassin d’élèves qui fréquentaient déjà notre centre, c’est sûr que ça chutait à trois groupes », explique Julie Larrivée, directrice adjointe du centre et responsable de la francisation.

    Alors que la rentrée s’amorce ces jours-ci, elle dit avoir dû refouler plusieurs candidats qui s’étaient inscrits sur la plateforme Francisation Québec tout juste après son lancement en juin et qui n’ont eu aucune nouvelle du MIFI depuis. « Les gens étaient désespérés, ils sont venus quand même nous voir pour nous demander quoi faire et où appeler. J’ai dû leur dire qu’ils ne pouvaient rien faire, qu’ils devaient surveiller leurs courriels tous les jours pour voir si le MIFI leur répondait. »

    En Beauce, des intervenants du milieu font le même constat. Avec ses collègues, Liliana Arcila, agente d’intégration au Carrefour jeunesse-emploi de Beauce-Nord, dit avoir inscrit pendant l’été sur Arrima (la plateforme vers laquelle Francisation Québec redirige les gens) une dizaine de travailleurs temporaires et de demandeurs d’asile voulant se franciser. « Personne n’a eu de nouvelles. Le site leur disait qu’ils allaient être contactés pour une évaluation, mais personne n’a pu commencer », indique-t-elle.

    Même son de cloche au Centre de services scolaire de la Beauce-Etchemin, où des dizaines de personnes inscrites après le 1er juin n’ont reçu aucune nouvelle. « D’habitude, on a 20, 30, 40 [étudiants de] niveau 1 qui rentrent en août et septembre. Mais là, les cours sont commencés, et les nouveaux étudiants ne sont pas là. Si quelqu’un nous appelle demain matin pour nous dire qu’il a eu son évaluation, on va devoir lui dire d’attendre à janvier », déplore une employée de ce centre de services, qui souhaite rester anonyme parce qu’elle n’a pas l’autorisation de son employeur pour s’adresser aux médias. « On est en train de mettre sur la glace une année complète d’école. »

    Des évaluations erronées

    Selon les données du MIFI, des 23 500 nouveaux dossiers complets (sur un total de quelque 30 000 nouvelles inscriptions en date du 20 août), la grande majorité des personnes n’auront pas besoin de subir d’évaluation, car elles ont déclaré n’avoir aucune ou avoir une très faible connaissance du français. Or, parmi les 7800 personnes devant passer un test, moins de la moitié (3000) ont été jusqu’ici évaluées par le bureau d’évaluation de Francisation Québec.

    De nombreux classements sont également erronés, a constaté Mme Larrivée. « On a vu beaucoup d’aberrations. On a des étudiants de la Tunisie qui ont été classés au niveau débutant. Ça ne se peut pas, ça. On voit qu’ils arrivent quand même à parler français. » D’autres, qui ont été classés dans les niveaux intermédiaires, doivent être recalés. « J’ai une enseignante qui a reporté d’une journée sa rentrée pour appeler tous les élèves sur sa liste. Elle a réajusté les classements. »

    Tania Longpré, doctorante en didactique des langues secondes et enseignante en francisation à Terrebonne, a fait le même constat. « J’ai reçu deux hommes la semaine dernière qui avaient été classés niveau 7 [par le MIFI], mais je les ai reclassés au niveau 3 », a raconté l’enseignante, qui signe une lettre ouverte dans Le Devoir pour déplorer les nombreux cafouillages de Francisation Québec en cette rentrée scolaire. « Je ne sais pas à quel point j’ai le droit de faire ça, mais je ne vais quand même pas laisser dans un niveau 7 quelqu’un qui ne parle pas français. »

    Selon ce qu’a rapporté Le Devoir en juin dernier, d’autres intervenants du milieu scolaire se sont inquiétés de la centralisation des pouvoirs en francisation au sein du MIFI. L’évaluation que fait le ministère des candidats— en ligne et seulement à l’oral — en avait fait sourciller quelques-uns.

    Julie Larrivée, du centre Louis-Jolliet, reconnaît que le système vit une transition. Mais elle estime tout de même que les étudiants étaient bien mieux servis avant. « Nous, ça fait 25 ans que notre expertise est développée », dit-elle.

    De record en record

    Après avoir connu une année record — 65 000 personnes ont suivi des cours de francisation l’an dernier —, le ministère de l’Immigration s’apprête à en vivre une autre. Au lancement de Francisation Québec, le 1er juin, on comptait déjà 16 000 personnes en attente, et une session record de cours d’été a été mise sur pied pour l’absorber le plus possible — un véritable tour de force, selon le MIFI.

    C’est d’ailleurs parce qu’il a fallu s’attaquer à réduire le nombre de personnes en attente que les nouveaux inscrits n’ont pas encore commencé leurs cours, a laissé savoir le ministère. « Comme l’offre de cours est moins importante durant la période estivale, notamment en raison des vacances du personnel enseignant, il est plus difficile de placer l’ensemble des élèves lors de cette période. Cette situation se résorbe habituellement par la reprise des sessions à l’automne. »

    À l’heure actuelle, 16 600 étudiants qui se sont inscrits avant la mise en place du guichet unique suivent des cours de francisation.

    Source: Un système surchargé fait rater la rentrée à des étudiants en francisation

    Filed under Immigration, Integration Tagged with ,

    Globe editorial: How the Liberals can roll back the surge in student visas (and blame Stephen Harper)

    2023/08/25 Leave a comment

    Likely one of the simpler solutions but will provoke considerable opposition given the number of education institutions that have largely become “visa mills.”

    Another lesson from the Harper years is with respect to Temporary Foreign Workers; when abuse and displacement of Canadian workers became apparent, the government reversed course and largely reimposed the restrictions it had imposed.

    One bit of political folk wisdom of Chretien (forget the context and the exact wording) was “when you paint yourself into a corner, you need to step on the paint.” Time for the government to do so with credible changes:

    Timid as it is, the federal Liberals’ mulling of a cap on the (already astronomical) number of international student visas met with instant opposition from Quebec and postsecondary institutions.

    Source: How the Liberals can roll back the surge in student visas (and blame Stephen Harper)

    Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

    Yakabuski: Capping foreign student visas isn’t as simple as it sounds

    2023/08/25 Leave a comment

    Good reminder that making choices harder that talking about “considering” limits. And, as always, interest groups, whether provincial governments, education institutions and associations, have louder voices that people affected by housing availability:

    Housing Minister Sean Fraser’s suggestion that Ottawa may consider limitingthe “explosive growth” in foreign student visas, which many experts say has contributed to Canada’s housing affordability crisis, is giving indigestion to college and university administrators.

    …

    Source: Capping foreign student visas isn’t as simple as it sounds

    Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

    Canada is Recruiting H-1Bs. DACA Recipients Could Be Next.  

    2023/08/25 Leave a comment

    Of note:

    Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, is a program that provides legal protections and work authorization to immigrants who otherwise lack legal status but were brought to the U.S. as children through no fault of their own. In place since 2012, DACA currently protects over 570,000 Dreamers, the majority of whom have been productive members of the American economy for years.

    Despite the well-documented contributions of DACA recipients, the program continues to hang in legal limbo. For two decades, Congress has failed to authorize permanent protection, and now, some Republican states are suing to terminate the program. While activists scramble for solutions ahead of an inauspicious Supreme Court decision, the door is open for Canada to poach yet another crucial group of U.S. residents.

    In recent months, Canada has escalated its efforts to actively recruit immigrants with work experience in the U.S. or an American education. From creating a new visa for specialized foreign workers in the U.S. to running targeted ads for individuals frustrated with the American immigration system, Canada and its businesses have long since benefited from the dysfunction of our immigration laws. 

    While Canada has not yet publicly attempted to entice DACA recipients to consider northern migration, it may be a matter of time before it does. DACA recipients would be competitive applicants for Canadian visa pathways like the points-based Express Entry program designed to attract the world’s best and brightest. 

    Express Entry does not require employer sponsorship and instead awards points for qualifying factors like work experience, English language proficiency, and education. Points are also assigned according to age, with applicants between 18 and 35 receiving the highest possible age points. 

    The average DACA recipient is 29 years old, and nearly half have college degrees. More than 80 percent of DACA recipients are working, and most have lived in the U.S. for over 20 years, receiving the majority, if not all, of their formal education here. Although many DACA recipients are bilingual, surveys indicate that “over 90 percent speak English well, or better.” By these standards, most DACA recipients would likely receive high scores that could result in invitations to migrate. 

    Given the number of American corporations that have previously voiced supportfor their Dreamer employees, it is easy to imagine employers willing to sponsor employees who transfer to their Canadian offices through other visa pathwaysshould they lose work authorization here. 

    If Canada poached these Dreamers, the United States would face significant economic losses as Canada reaps the benefits of highly productive U.S.-trained immigrants. 

    For instance, Dreamers would pay their rent or mortgage in Canada, which, in the U.S., currently generates $272 billion in economic activity every month. They would spend money on groceries, clothes, transportation, and services in Canada. 

    The U.S. would also lose teachers and essential workers while Canada filled its labor market gaps with our American-educated talent. The nearly $40 billion that Dreamers would contribute to Social Security and Medicare over the next ten years would instead bolster the Canadian social security system. 

    Even after taxes, DACA-recipient households still hold over $25 billion in spending power, but if they go to Canada, their money will likely go with them. Under the Express Entry program, selected candidates receive permanent residence for themselves, their spouses or common-law partners, and their dependent children. Even temporary foreign worker programs in Canada permit immediate family members to accompany the beneficiary and work. 

    With over 300,000 U.S. citizen children, the impacts of their departure would represent a significant loss for the U.S. economy and labor market when we are already struggling to fill the jobs we need. DACA recipients are, on average, more educated than the native-born U.S. population and have higher workforce participation rates. Yet, without action, we risk losing these productive individuals raised with American values, educated in the American school system, and trained in the American labor market. 

    We have already witnessed Canada siphoning thousands of our valuable immigrant workers and taking advantage of our inability to create policies that retain the talent we attract and cultivate. If we do not act on DACA, Canada will also take advantage of this opportunity by becoming the haven that DACA recipients have been seeking in the U.S. for over a decade. Bipartisan solutions can protect Dreamers and allow them to stay and contribute to the only home they’ve ever truly known. Timely action is imperative. 

    Source: Canada is Recruiting H-1Bs. DACA Recipients Could Be Next.

    Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

    Will reining in the number of international students in Canada help the housing crisis — or bring more harm?

    2023/08/24 Leave a comment

    Some good comments by immigration lawyer Raj Sharma and if I do say myself, me:

    Canada’s post-secondary education sector is pushing back on a proposed cap on international student admission, arguing it won’t help address the country’s current housing crisis but threatens the economy.

    “Although implementing a cap on international students may seem to provide temporary relief, it could have lasting adverse effects on our communities, including exacerbating current labour shortages,” said Colleges and Institutes Canada, the largest national post-secondary advocacy group.

    “We want to emphasize that students are not to blame for Canada’s housing crisis; they are among those most impacted.”

    The group, which represents 141 schools across Canada, was responding to a suggestion by Housing Minister Sean Fraser at the federal cabinet retreat in Charlottetown to restrict the number of international students to help ease the housing crunch.

    “That’s one of the options that we ought to consider,” the former immigration minister told reporters on Monday.

    On Tuesday, Marc Miller, his successor, echoed the need to rein in the growth of international enrolment.

    “Abuses in the system exist and must be tackled in smart and logical ways,” Bahoz Dara Aziz, Miller’s press secretary, told the Star. “This potentially includes implementing a cap.

    “But that can’t be the only measure, as it doesn’t address the entire problem. We’re currently looking at a number of options in order to take a multi-faceted approach to this.”

    The post-secondary educational sector has increasingly relied on revenue from international students to subsidize the Canadian tertiary education system after years of government cuts.

    According to the Canadian Bureau for International Education, there were 807,750 international students in Canada at all levels of study last year, up 43 per cent from five years ago.

    So much is at stake with international students, who pay significantly higher tuition rates than Canadians, contributing more than $21 billion to colleges and universities, local communities and the economy nationwide, creating 180,000 jobs.

    Fraser’s remarks also marked a change from when he was overseeing Immigration and staunchly defended the Liberals’ record immigration levels and strategy to stimulate economic recovery through immigration.

    “I find this a little bit disingenuous,” said Calgary immigration lawyer Raj Sharma. “The minister who’s talking about capping international students is the same minister that eliminated the 20-hour limit of working in a week for the international students.”

    “It’s very odd for Mr. Fraser to be speaking out of both sides of his mouth.”

    While concentration of international students in particular urban hot spots has contributed to the rising rental costs and strained housing supplies in the GTA, the Lower Mainland in B.C. and parts of Alberta and the Maritimes, Sharma said the housing challenges predated the influx.

    International students have become such an integral part of the immigration system and the Canadian economy that it’s hard to just turn the tap on and off, he said.

    Canada has made it a policy a decade ago to attract more international students and eased the rules by offering postgraduate work permits and a pathway for permanent residence.

    International students have been touted as ideal immigrants because of their Canadian education and employment credentials. However, critics have warned that international education has been misused as a shortcut for those only here for a shot at permanent residence.

    “There’s a lot of stakeholders, a lot of vested interest in keeping international student intake high. These students are exploited from basically before they come to Canada and then after they come to Canada up until they become permanent residents,” said Sharma.

    “So there’s employers that are using them as cheap labour. These international students are causing even concern among various diasporic communities that they’re driving down wages.”

    The immigration minister’s office said it recognizes the important role international students play in local communities and to Canada’s economy, but something has to be done.

    “To tackle these challenges around fraud and bad actors, we also have to have some difficult conversations with the provinces around the threats to the integrity of the system, and outline the perverse incentives that it’s created for institutions,” Aziz said.

    “We must also reward the good actors because there is so much real value in the international students program, and those who do it well are essentially mentoring the future of this country.”

    The surge of international students is only part of the problem as the number of temporary foreign workers and work permit holders are also going through the roof in recent years, said Andrew Griffith, a retired director general at the federal immigration department.

    The number of temporary foreign worker positions approved through a Labour Market Impact Assessment annually have skyrocketed from 89,416 in 2015 to 221,933 last year, according to federal data.

    The numbers don’t include the hundreds of thousands of international graduates who have open work permits, refugee claimants pending asylum and those who arrive from more than two dozen countries that have shared mobility agreements with Canada.

    “They picked international students because they probably calculated it’s the easiest group to go after. There are enough stories about abuse that it’s a way to get into Canada,” said Griffith.

    “It’s by no means a slam dunk, but it does signal that the government is starting to realize that there are some impacts of large immigration. You can’t just expand immigration and expect that society will automatically adapt.”

    Griffith said any immediate relief to the housing market won’t be felt in at least a year until the next round of intake because it’s already September and incoming students have been issued student visas or are in Canada.

    In Ontario, international students accounted for 30 per cent of the public post-secondary student population and represented 68 per cent of total tuition revenue in the 2020-21 school year, said Jonathan Singer, chair of the College Faculty Division of OPSEU, which represents 16,000 college professors, instructors, counsellors and librarians.

    Singer said any cap on international students would need to be accompanied by a model of stable and predictable post-secondary provincial funding. When such a funding model was last in place in Ontario, he added, the schools had no need to seek out a number of international students that they or the province couldn’t manage.

    “One role they shouldn’t have to play is filling in the fiscal gaps left by an erosion in public funding,” Singer explained. “Our colleges and universities need to ask how many international students they have the resources to accommodate — including supports related to housing, academics and health care, including mental health.”

    Although education is a provincial jurisdiction and admissions are the responsibility of the schools, both Sharma and Griffith said the federal government does have the leverage to raise the bar for language proficiency and financial assets in granting visas to students as a control mechanism.

    “If you increase the quality of the intake and necessarily that may result in a decrease in the hard numbers,” said Sharma. “But instead of capping it, I think it’s time for us to optimize it and ensure that we’re getting the best bang for our buck.”

    Colleges and Institutes Canada said its members have long recognized housing shortage challenges and have fast-tracked the development of new residences and approvals for building accommodations. It has also asked Ottawa to invest $2.6 billion in a new Student Housing Loan and Grant Program.

    Source: Will reining in the number of international students in Canada help the housing crisis — or bring more harm?

    Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , ,

    Quebec rejects cap on student visas floated by Ottawa to address housing crisis 

    2023/08/24 Leave a comment

    Expect other provinces will join the chorus given all rely on international students to fund post-secondary education. Education organizations already also chiming in:

    The Quebec government says it won’t accept a cap on the number of international students it can admit, rejecting one of the options the federal government is considering as part of a plan to tackle a national housing crisis.

    Universities and colleges, meanwhile, said they were surprised and troubled, respectively, by the suggestion, which was first raised by Housing and Infrastructure Minister Sean Fraser at a Liberal cabinet retreat in Charlottetown on Monday.

    Quebec’s reaction indicates that attempts to limit international student admissions could create conflict with the provinces. They have jurisdiction in areas of education and their postsecondary institutions have come to rely on lucrative international tuition fees.

    “Quebec does not intend to impose a cap on the number of foreign students in its jurisdiction. Although issuing study permits is the responsibility of the federal government, education is the exclusive power of Quebec. It’s up to Quebec and its educational institutions to determine the number of people they can accommodate,” said Alexandre Lahaie, a spokesperson for Quebec Immigration Minister Christine Fréchette.

    Federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller confirmed his government is strongly considering a cap on the number of international students Canada accepts. But Mr. Miller stressed that such a measure alone won’t fix the housing crunch.

    “This will be a multipronged approach. A cap is something we’ll definitely entertain,” Mr. Miller said on Tuesday.

    The number of international students in Canada soared past 800,000 in 2022, more than twice as many as when Justin Trudeau’s government took office in 2015. Some experts have said the influx of students in need of lower-cost rental accommodation has contributed to rising rents in some cities, at a time when construction of new housing has been inadequate.

    More than half of all international study permits issued in 2022 went to students at Canadian colleges, a sector that has surpassed universities as the top destination for international students.

    In a statement, Colleges and Institutes Canada, which represents publicly funded colleges, said it is “troubled” by the suggestion of a cap on international enrolment.

    “Although implementing a cap on international students may seem to provide temporary relief, it could have lasting adverse effects on our communities, including exacerbating current labour shortages. Furthermore, we want to emphasize that students are not to blame for Canada’s housing crisis; they are among those most impacted,” Colleges and Institutes Canada said in a statement.

    Michael Sangster, president of the National Association of Career Colleges, which represents private colleges, said his members are willing to work with a cap, if that’s what the federal government decides, or with a trusted institution model, another proposal the federal government has floated that could see institutions with a good track record receive preference in permit processing.

    “The students that are coming to our institutions, many of them are training to become tradespeople to build the homes we need. So we’re in a bit of a catch-22 right now, but we want to be part of the solution,” Mr. Sangster said.

    Philip Landon, interim president of Universities Canada, an umbrella group representing nearly 100 institutions, said the idea of a cap on international university students is concerning and something universities don’t believe is necessary.

    “Universities seek to attract talented students to Canada and have been doing so in a responsible way with responsible growth rates,” he said.

    Mr. Landon called on the federal government to make low-cost financing available to universities to allow them to build more residence spaces.

    Mr. Miller said the government is already in talks with postsecondary schools about what they can do to guarantee more housing availability. He said provinces also need to be at the table, as they’ve benefited greatly from the international student program.

    He said it has become “very lucrative” for some schools, adding that the economic impact of international students in Canada is more than $20-billion a year. While he said much of that is good, there is also “some abuse in the system.”

    The international student program is a temporary resident immigration stream that isn’t subject to the yearly caps or targets that Ottawa sets for permanent resident immigration streams.

    Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said Tuesday that the premiers have not raised the need for a cap on foreign students with him. He added that while they talk often about the need for more housing, the premiers have also made clear they need more immigrants to fill labour shortages, including in the construction industry.

    Mike Moffatt, the founding director of the PLACE Centre at the Smart Prosperity Institute and one of the authors of a new report on housing supply, spoke to the federal cabinet behind closed doors on Tuesday.

    He said the increase in foreign students has had knock-on effects in the housing market that have helped turn a rental crisis into a home-ownership crisis.

    In the area around Fanshawe College in London, Ont., for example, neighbourhoods once occupied by young families have “turned into a sea of student rentals” bought up by investors, he said.

    “Domestic and international students are the biggest victims of this, not the cause of it,” he said.

    “This is a systemic failure, I would say of both the federal and provincial governments and as well the higher education sector.”

    Source: Quebec rejects cap on student visas floated by Ottawa to address housing crisis

    Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , , ,

    Clark: The Liberal housing plan is overdue

    2023/08/24 Leave a comment

    Indeed. As it is for an annual immigration plan that includes temporary workers and international students:

    You have to agree with Housing Minister Sean Fraser’s assertion that the answer to Canada’s housing crisis isn’t new political branding. Still, it would be nice if the federal government had a plan.

    The good news is there are signs that the Liberal government is putting together what could be the rudiments of a plan. But it needs an actual plan. And it needs to come to grips with the screaming urgency.

    So perhaps the best exercise for the Liberal cabinet retreat taking place in Charlottetown this week would be having all ministers dip their heads in vats of ice water before and after their briefings about the housing crisis. You know, so everyone there feels the kind of shocking wake-up call that should be motivating them now.

    It sounded promising when Mr. Fraser, freshly appointed as Housing Minister on July 26, outlined some of the government’s thinking about increasing the housing supply – and even said he thinks the government is thinking of capping the rapidly increasing number of international students coming to Canada. But then he said a decision on that is “premature” right now.

    The problem is that Mr. Fraser is mixing up the concepts of “premature” and “overdue.”

    The feds have missed a window to cap – and reduce – those numbers for this school year.

    Let’s note here that Mr. Fraser is quite right when he says that we should be careful not to “somehow blame immigrants for the housing challenges that have been several decades in the works in Canada.”

    That’s absolutely true. We should blame governments. They failed to plan.

    Immigration itself isn’t the cause of the problem: It is good for Canada, and international students can be an especially good thing. But successive governments, federal and provincial, encouraged a boom in numbers, especially international student numbers, without planning policies to encourage housing for them.

    One of the people briefing the Liberal cabinet Tuesday was economist Mike Moffatt, who has been doing the academic equivalent of waving his arms trying to get governments to pay attention to the problem. “We are in a crisis and a war-time-like effort is needed. The federal government must prioritize speed and act now,” he wrote in The Hub this week.

    Mr. Moffatt’s diagnosis boils down to the fact that the population grew quickly in recent years, especially in Ontario, but the pace of home-building was a lot slower. Few places for a lot more people means house prices and now apartment rents skyrocketed.

    The rapid population growth went a little under the radar because it was not just an increase in permanent immigrants. The number of temporary residents has ballooned. In 2015, there were 352,325 international students. In 2021, the number was 617,250. The following year, 2022, it was 807,260. But there weren’t a lot more student residences and apartments for rent.

    Now the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation estimates Canada needs to build 5.8 million homes by 2030 to make housing affordable again. So it’s good the Liberals are talking about policies to encourage more home-building. Mr. Fraser unironically noted that the Liberals campaigned on some of them in the past two elections. In fact, they promised to remove the GST on purpose-built rental housing back in 2015. It’s time to step it up.

    It’s true successive federal governments are to blame. Municipal administrations and provincial governments are to blame for a lot of it, too. All for a lack of planning.

    Now the plan is urgent, and it will have to include short-term measures like cutting back the number of international students. A government that doesn’t craft such a plan will create more poverty and damage many Canadians’ standard of living. And despite Mr. Fraser’s words, it is not at all clear Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet is shaking off the complacency.

    Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said he hadn’t heard talk of the idea of capping the number of international students and hasn’t spoken to premiers about it.

    Mr. Trudeau, who was criticized three weeks ago for saying housing is not a primary federal responsibility, provided a nonsensical explanation for that on Monday when he said his point was that his Conservative predecessor, Stephen Harper, had “completely walked away from housing.”

    And sure, we have to expect politicians will make points about politics. But this is a bigger issue now, and it’s time to pull together a plan.

    Source: The Liberal housing plan is overdue

    Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , ,

    Keller: The Liberals broke the education visa system, but they had lots of help

    2023/08/23 Leave a comment

    Another good column by Keller, on how the objectives of international student recruitment have been largely overtaken by economic objectives of low-paid workers:

    Over the last two decades, the number of foreign students studying in Canada has increased almost sevenfold, to more than 800,000. The jump has been particularly sharp in recent years. At the end of 2022, there were nearly half a million more visa students than in 2015.

    At first blush, this sounds like a success story: Canadian higher education must be so outstanding that record numbers from around the world are lining up to pay university and college tuitions several times higher than those for Canadian students.

    Foreign students clearly believe that they’re paying for something that offers a positive return on their investment. But what are they paying for? And what are they getting?

    Also: What are we getting?

    For many international students, what they are buying is mostly not education. And what many – or most – schools are selling is not education. A big part of what is being bought and sold are public goods: the right to enter Canada, to legally work and to get on a track to citizenship.

    There are, of course, excellent university and college programs attracting the best and the brightest to this country. That’s what tying higher education to immigration is supposed to be doing: boosting economic vitality by pulling in, say, the world’s best engineering or computer science students, and giving them opportunities to become Canadians after graduation.

    Using foreign student recruitment to raise the education and skill level of the work force benefits all Canadians. When highly-skilled and productive foreigners graduate from a high-level program and become even more skilled and productive – and choose to become Canadians – everyone wins.

    But much of the current visa-student pathway is about something else. It has become an important, though unofficial, stream of temporary foreign workers – a bottomless supply of labour to flip burgers, stack boxes and deliver late-night burritos, at minimum wage. And the number of student visas on offer is not capped.

    Consider what’s happening at Ontario’s 24 public colleges. Between 2012 and 2020, their foreign enrolment grew by 342 per cent. There’s been more growth in the last three years. But a large part of that growth comes from public colleges selling their name, and their publicly-bestowed credentials, to private operators.

    Students in these so-called public-private career college partnerships are often hosted at a “campus” that is a few classrooms in a strip mall or office park, usually somewhere in the Greater Toronto Area – and often hundreds of kilometres from the public college whose credentials the private partner paid to use.

    Consider Lambton College in Sarnia. According to its strategic mandate agreement with the province, between 2020 and 2024 it expects domestic student enrolment to drop from 2,104 to 2,038. But international student enrolment will more than double to almost 9,000. Most visa students study at one of two campuses in Toronto, run by private operators in suburban office parks.

    Why is a foreign student willing to pay $25,460 tuition for a four-semester course in hotel and resort management, from a Lambton-affiliated private business called “Queen’s College,” in a warehouse district in Mississauga?

    Perhaps because the holder of an education visa can legally work while enrolled. And thanks to private Queen’s link with public Lambton, the federal government will issue another work visa upon graduation. Even a low-level Canadian educational credential plus Canadian work experience boosts one’s chances of claiming “PR” status – permanent residency, the last stop before citizenship.

    That’s what many schools are selling. At $25,460, it’s a bargain.

    But it brings me back to the question of why Canada is not being more selective. Using the education-to-citizenship pathway to recruit highly skilled, future Canadian citizens is a great idea. It boosts GDP-per-capita, increasing the size of the economic pie by more than the number of forks in the pie.

    But much of the educational visa stream is no longer about that. And graded on the curve, Lambton is far from the bottom of the class.

    The federal government lists 526 higher-education institutions in Ontario as “designated learning institutions.” Most are private and may not offer much in the way of education. Yet enrolling at any DLI includes the opportunity to come to Canada on a student visa, and the legal right to work while enrolled.

    Even more than at public colleges, that’s what foreign students at private career colleges appear to be paying for: the right to enter Canada, and to work, mostly at low-skill, low-wage jobs.

    However, despite the fact that governments have allowed private operators access to a bottomless helping of student visas, they’re sufficiently dubious of their education that completion of a private career college program generally does not gives students the right to a post-graduation work visa – unlike grads from public-private partnerships.

    When these private college students are asked to stop working and leave Canada upon graduation from their short course, will they? Don’t bet on it. But that’s a column for another day.

    Source: The Liberals broke the education visa system, but they had lots of help

    Filed under Immigration Tagged with ,

    Federal government should look at cap on student visas, Housing Minister Sean Fraser says

    2023/08/23 Leave a comment

    Looking at vs doing something about….

    Raj Sharma developed what I view as a neat little test as to whether the government is serious or not:

    The federal government should reassess its policy on international students and consider a cap on a program that has seen “explosive growth,” putting pressure on rental markets and driving up costs, Housing and Infrastructure Minister Sean Fraser said.

    The number of international students in Canada has more than doubled since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took office in 2015, government data show. At the end of 2022, it sat at 807,260.

    “The reality is we’ve got temporary immigration programs that were never designed to see such explosive growth in such a short period of time,” Mr. Fraser said Monday in Charlottetown. He noted that unlike the permanent resident immigration programs where the government sets targets each year, the study permit program is a temporary resident program that is driven by demand and doesn’t have a set cap.

    He said the growth of the program for international students is happening in concentrated regions of Canada and is putting an “unprecedented level of demand” on the job market but even “more pronounced” demand on the housing market.

    Asked if the government should cap the number of international students allowed in Canada each year, he said it’s an option Ottawa should consider.

    Mr. Fraser did not provide any timeline for when Ottawa might lower the number of study permits issued. Asked if a change would be made this fall, he said Immigration Minister Marc Miller would have more to say at a later date.

    Mr. Fraser spoke to reporters on the sidelines of a three-day cabinet retreat in Prince Edward Island.

    The affordability crisis pushing many Canadians to the brink, in particular owing to rising housing costs, is at the top of the agenda for the meetings. The government wants to come up with new ways to make the first-time homebuyers’ market more accessible and also address rental costs that are increasingly unsustainable for lower- and middle-income households.

    Postsecondary schools in Canada have relied more and more on international students for their revenue streams because their tuition fees are much higher than the fees paid by domestic students.

    Mr. Fraser said the federal government needs to work with colleges and universities to ensure those institutions also take responsibility for housing the record numbers of international students they’re accepting.

    He also said the government needs to more closely scrutinize private colleges, some of which he suggested were illegitimate and taking advantage of the international student permit system.

    Some of those schools “exist purely to profit off the backs of vulnerable international students,” Mr. Fraser said. He added that there are some “plaza colleges” that have up to six times more students enrolled than physical space for them in their buildings.

    “Not all private colleges should be treated with the same brush,” he said. “There are good private institutions out there and separating the wheat from the chaff is going to be a big focus of the work.”

    As part of the federal cabinet’s focus on the housing crisis, it will hear from two of the authors of a report released last week. That report says the spike in rental housing costs is in part attributed to the growth in young adults living in Canada, which is in part linked to the rise in international students

    The authors call on the government to establish an industrial strategy for housing, saying that in order to restore affordability by 2030, the country needs to build 5.8 million more housing units, of which approximately two million should be rentals.

    In Ottawa, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre blamed the government for the sky-high housing costs, noting the rapid rise has happened under Mr. Trudeau’s watch.

    “Now he wants Canadians to forget all that and blame immigrants; he wants to divide people to distract from his failings,” Mr. Poilievre told reporters on Parliament Hill.

    Mr. Poilievre would not say whether he would lower immigration levels, and instead said that Ottawa needs to crack down on slow-moving municipal bureaucracies that make it harder to start construction projects.

    In Charlottetown, the Housing Minister stressed the need to be “really, really careful” not to blame immigrants for Canada’s housing crisis. And Mr. Fraser dismissed Mr. Poilievre’s criticism entirely, saying the Conservatives are now promising what the Liberals have already campaigned on in past elections.

    At a separate press conference, Mr. Trudeau told reporters in Cornwall, PEI, that immigration is a key part of the solution for Canada’s housing shortage because the construction industry needs more skilled labour.

    “There’s much more we need to do on housing and we’re continuing to step up,” he said. “But we’re going to continue to be the open, welcoming, prosperous and growing country we’ve always been, because that has been something that has led to great opportunities and prosperity for all Canadians.”

    Source: Federal government should look at cap on student visas, Housing Minister Sean Fraser says

    Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

    Regg Cohn: Doug Ford hits a new low by using immigrants to sell his Greenbelt scheme

    2023/08/23 Leave a comment

    Of note:

    Doug Ford is peddling a risky strategy to save his political skin, and it’s not pretty.

    It goes like this:

    Unless we gut the Greenbelt, we can’t construct all the homes needed for waves of new immigrants and refugees.

    And unless we build all that new housing urgently, resentment will build up rapidly against all those newcomers.

    Day after day, as the premier digs himself into a deeper and deeper political hole, he repeatedly raises the alarm: If you block the bulldozing of protected lands, you risk a popular backlash.

    Far better to let me unravel the Greenbelt than allow my opponents to undermine tolerance for immigrants and refugees — which will surely happen if anyone thwarts my controversial new housing plan. Unless you let me chew up those protected lands, we will all choke on a housing shortage that is somehow the fault of foreigners.

    If Ford’s fanciful scenario sounds over the top, the unpleasant reality is that he has hit a new low. Just listen to how Ontario’s premier keeps drumming up support by whipping up fears of an unaffordable foreign influx:

    “Failing to act threatens to erode Canadians’ so-far unwavering support for immigration,” Ford claimed on Aug. 9, the day the auditor general delivered a damning report of his government’s political interference in gifting Greenbelt lands worth $8.28 billion to “favoured” developers.

    He used the same phrasing again two days later, reading from the same Teleprompter: “Failing to act threatens to erode our unwavering support for immigration.”

    Again on Monday, in a highly touted speech to municipal leaders from across the province, the premier repeated his gut-the-Greenbelt-or-else warning: “Failing that would threaten to erode Canadians’ unwavering support for immigration.”

    Over and over, again and again, Ford purports to be raising the alarm in his role as a guardian of social cohesion. But if tolerance is truly his goal, the premier is playing with rhetorical fire.

    It’s not a dog whistle. It’s a bullhorn being blown from Ford’s bully pulpit.

    The premier’s comments this week to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario were especially unseemly and unsettling. His speech brought back memories of Ford’s performance in early 2018, when he told an audience of northern mayors that he wanted to put Ontarians to work first, before ever letting in foreigners who might take their jobs.

    Back then, Ford’s parochial pitch fell flat in front of a more worldly audience of northerners, who well understood the massive demand for talented foreign doctors and nurses, teachers and preachers, traders and tradespeople in their rapidly depopulating cities and towns. But it took a while for the premier to catch on.

    Again in 2018, Ford turned his wrath on “illegal border-crossers,” picking a fight with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau by claiming, wrongly, that “this mess was 100 per cent the result of the federal government.” It was an attempt to whip up resentment then, just as he risks fanning prejudice now.

    Let’s be clear about the housing squeeze, the Greenbelt gambit and the foreign factor. No matter how many times Ford tries to connect the dots and paint by numbers, he is making it up as he goes along.

    As much as Ford keeps pointing to future immigration levels as justification for his action, the truth is that the housing shortage long predates it. Even as the premier continually cites the Greenbelt giveaway as the prerequisite to building new homes, the reality is that his own housing advisory task force (and the auditor) argued the precise opposite.

    In fact, there is more than enough land that can be repurposed to meet the government’s building targets without cannibalizing protected lands. In any case, the auditor’s report notes that the government had already met its specific housing targets last October, a full month before it suddenly went back to the well by targeting the Greenbelt.

    There is no shortage of land in the region, just a paucity of political will and economic ambition. There is, however, a shortage of skilled labour today that will grow more acute in future, which explains the need for rising immigration targets.

    Historically, there has been a remarkable political consensus on the benefits of immigration for a small population in a big country. That’s not to say that asking questions about the right level of immigration should be taboo.

    But an elected leader must be mindful of his musings lest he legitimize the blaming and scapegoating of outsiders for our own internal miscalculations and misconceptions. Our housing shortage remains a homegrown problem, and our affordability challenges are not about foreigners.

    The environmentally and agriculturally sensitive lands that form a protective cordon against uncontrolled urban sprawl are neither the problem nor the solution — just a distraction and a temptation. Which is why this Progressive Conservative government is playing a dangerous game by pretending we cannot afford to preserve the Greenbelt without fracturing societal tolerance toward newcomers.

    This premier has vowed never to back down on his scandalous rezoning of the Greenbelt — a bonanza that is benefiting developers with billions of dollars in windfall profits. The least he could do is stop using immigrants and refugees as fodder for his speeches.

    Source: Doug Ford hits a new low by using immigrants to sell his Greenbelt scheme

    Filed under Immigration Tagged with , ,

    ← Older posts

    Newer posts →