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.
Multicultural Meanderings 