Fewer international master’s students given permits to study in last two years, figures show

2026/02/20 Leave a comment

Interesting, given that graduate students are exempt from the cap:

…A breakdown of the IRCC figures, disclosed to The Globe and Mail on Wednesday, shows that between January and September, 2024, there were 28,605 new study permits issued to master’s degree students. But in 2025 over the same period that number dropped by 46 per cent to 15,390. 

The number of permits issued by the Immigration Department to allow students to study for bachelor degrees dropped 40 per cent, from 33,250 between January and September, 2024, to 20,045 over the same period in 2025.

The starkest reduction in study permits was to foreign nationals applying to study at Canadian colleges. 

There was an 82-per-cent decrease in the number of study permits issued to international students to study at colleges, from 101,025 between January and September, 2024, to 18,105 in the same period last year. 

There was a slight drop in the number of study permits issued to doctoral students between 2024 and 2025, from 3,305 to 3,225, the figures show. 

At Ontario universities, the reduction in the number of international master’s and bachelor degree students was less dramatic than in Canada over all. There was a roughly 14-per-cent drop for both bachelor and master’s students, according to the Council of Ontario Universities. …

Source: Fewer international master’s students given permits to study in last two years, figures show

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Ottawa seeks to attract grad students from abroad 

2026/02/19 Leave a comment

Makes sense, focus on graduate students at universities to counter the general impression:

The Immigration Department is conducting a social-media campaign to attract more graduate students from abroad, including broadcasting that their family could apply to come with them.

The initiative aims to bring in more top researchers as figures published Monday show a steep drop in the number of international students who have come to Canada over the past year.

Experts say that the federal government’s crackdown on the number of international students, which started under former prime minister Justin Trudeau and coincided with plunging public support for more immigration, has made Canada a less attractive higher-education destination for foreign nationals overall.

The clampdown was not focused on international students attending top universities or graduate programs. Former immigration minister Marc Miller said the goal was to target colleges and private universities that charged high fees for low-value degrees to students who hoped to stay in Canada. But the changes appear to have had a wider deterrent effect….

Source: Ottawa seeks to attract grad students from abroad

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The people who want the temporary migrants to stay permanently

2026/02/19 Leave a comment

The National Post listing organizations opposed to government cuts and supporting regularization for all:

With a record two million temporary migrants set to lose their status in the coming months, a union-championed campaign is emerging to demand that all of them be allowed to stay permanently in Canada.

This week, a new group calling itself the United Immigrant Workers Front announced plans to hold its inaugural rally in Brampton, Ont.

In a Monday video posted to Instagram, group organizers cited the pending expiration of two million visas, and expressed their belief that all should have their permits extended and be given a “path to permanent residency.”

This follows on a wave of demonstrations in Quebec similarly calling for migrants on expiring visas to be kept in the country.

The Quebec government is phasing out its Programme de l’expérience Québécoise, a program which previously fast-tracked international students and foreign workers into permanent residency. It’s being replaced by a much more selective skills-based nominee program.

With many thousands of temporary workers set to lose their legal status as a result of the change, the Union of Quebec Municipalities, along with several businesses and labour unions, is leading a pressure campaign to allow those migrants to “continue their lives here.”

All the while, many of Canada’s largest unions and labour organizations have been publishing literature demanding that Canada’s millions of temporary migrants be allowed to stay.

In late 2024, only a few weeks after Ottawa first signalled its intention to slash temporary migration rates, the Canadian Labour Congress issued a communique entitled “migrant workers in Canada deserve access to permanent residency and citizenship.”

Canada currently has more temporary migrants in the country than at almost any other point in its history, and the government of Prime Minister Mark Carney has been explicit in its goal to bring that figure down.

At the beginning of 2022, Statistics Canada tracked 1.4 million foreign nationals living in Canada as “non-permanent residents.”

This would surge to an October 2024 high of 3.2 million, with temporary residents representing 7.5 per cent of the total Canadian population.

The spike had been enabled by the federal government dropping quotas and restrictions on everything from foreign student visas to Temporary Foreign Worker admissions.

And as of Statistics Canada’s last count, the number of temporary migrants in the country still stands at 2.8 million; higher than at any other point prior to 2024.

This means that roughly one in every 15 people in Canada is here as a non-permanent resident. Just 10 years ago, the figure was closer to one in every 50.

While the Liberals once officially denied that skyrocketing temporary immigration was having negative impacts on civic society, the federal government and Carney himself have now stated that the surge overwhelmed real estate prices, health-care delivery and other public services. In a November speech in Toronto, Carney said that the surge in temporary migration “far exceeded our ability to welcome people and make sure that they had good housing and services.”

The 2025 federal budget similarly said that “unsustainable” immigration had “put pressures on housing demand” and crowded younger Canadians out of the job market. “Managed immigration growth is now helping to stabilise labour-market conditions and is expected to support better outcomes for youth,” it read. The Carney government’s official plan is to curb temporary migration to the point that non-permanent residents represent only five per cent of the total Canadian population; about two million total.

Some of that will indeed be in the form of temporary migrants being fast-tracked into permanent residency, but Ottawa has acknowledged that other visa-holders will be expected to leave “voluntarily.”

One potential problem with this strategy is that Canada is extremely limited in its ability to remove temporary migrants who refuse to leave voluntarily.

Immigration, Citizenship and Refugees Canada has no official tally on when temporary migrants actually leave the country, and the Canada Border Services Agency only has the capacity to remove a limited number of people who overstay their visas.

Last year, CBSA had one of the most active years in its history. Their total removals came to about 22,000, with another 40,000 “inadmissible” people refused entry.

Source: The people who want the temporary migrants to stay permanently

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Ontario lifts tuition freeze, unveils OSAP reforms as it boosts university and college funding. Here’s what it will mean for schools and students

2026/02/14 Leave a comment

Partially correcting a problem that they created and was forced by federal government correctly cutting back on the excessive growth in international students, particularly in colleges:

Colleges and universities are getting more funding — an additional $6.4 billion over the next four years — and will be able to charge students slightly higher tuition rates, as the province’s longstanding fee freeze comes to an end. 

The government’s Thursday announcement was based on months of consultations and warnings from the post-secondary sector that stagnant funding from the province — combined with the seven-year ban on tuition hikes and massive cuts to international students imposed by Ottawa — left them on the financial brink.

Schools will now be able to raise fees by two per cent each year for the next three years, with future increases tied to inflation or two per cent, whichever is less. That means university students will pay roughly $170 more a year and college students $66 — which, combined with a move away from non-repayable student aid grants, has critics raising concerns about affordability. …

Source: Ontario lifts tuition freeze, unveils OSAP reforms as it boosts university and college funding. Here’s what it will mean for schools and students

Good commentary by Regg Cohn:

…Belatedly — better late than never — Ford’s Progressive Conservative government is stepping up to shore up postsecondary education. On Thursday it announced a $6.4-billion cash infusion over the next four years to make up for the last seven years of cuts, freezes and shortfalls since Ford took power.

Back in 2019, the premier played Santa Claus by imposing a 10-per-cent tuition cut, but then played Scrooge by freezing those rates in place without making up for the lost cash flow. Instead, the government urged postsecondary institutions to recruit and rely on high-paying foreign students to shore up their balance sheets, which stoked immigration imbalances that ultimately forced Ottawa to scale back student visas.

Those political and fiscal miscalculations created a perfect storm in postsecondary education: Funding shortfalls; tuition cuts frozen in time despite an inflationary spiral; and the sudden loss of foreign windfalls that kept campuses afloat.

None of it added up, least of all the tuition freeze enacted by a populist premier who wouldn’t pony up his share of the funding pie.

Regg Cohn | Doug Ford has learned a hard lesson after starving Ontario’s colleges and universities


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International students in Canada face vastly different health-care access depending on where they live. Here’s what researchers found

2026/01/30 Leave a comment

Useful comparison (I had to generate a similar analysis to separate out non-resident self-pay international students from those covered under provincial health plans for my birth tourism analysis:

…Of all provinces and territories, Alberta, New Brunswick, Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan and Prince Edward Island have the greatest access to free public health care for international students, while those studying in Ontario, Manitoba and Yukon only have private options.

B.C. requires a three-month waiting period and a monthly $75 fee to get on the provincial health insurance plan. In Quebec, public free health-care services are only available for students from one of the countries that have signed a social security agreement with the province; others must buy private insurance offered at their university or other private health insurance.

In Newfoundland and Labrador all international students enrolled full time for at least 12 months are automatically registered for the Foreign Health Insurance plan — $261.59 per semester — while Nova Scotia only offers free public health care after one year of study.

Those in Ontario post-secondary education must enrol in the private insurance plans provided by their institutions. Most universities use the University Health Insurance Plan (UHIP) at an annual premium of $792, while colleges use other providers with varying fees.

In Manitoba, international students pay an annual fee of $1,200 for private health insurance. The mandatory group insurance plan for students in Yukon cost $565 a year.

“The students I talked to didn’t know that these disparities existed across Canada,” said report author Tracy Glynn, a director of the Canadian Health Coalition, a national advocacy group supporting public health care. “It’s just by luck if somebody ends up in, say, New Brunswick, where there’s public care available immediately.”…

Source: International students in Canada face vastly different health-care access depending on where they live. Here’s what researchers found

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ICYMI – Revealed: How international student spots are being distributed — unevenly — across Ontario

2026/01/13 Leave a comment

Good and useful data:

…Previous efforts to understand how PALs were distributed across the province were hindered by confidentiality claims and concerns about the impact on competitive advantage, but data obtained through an FOI request provides a detailed breakdown of 2024 allocations and usage, as well as this year’s allocations. Usage data for 2025 is not yet available.

In 2024, Ontario was allocated a total of 235,000 PALs, with a target of 141,000 permits.

Ontario’s public colleges were given 189,416 PALs but used only 55 per cent of them. Public universities, by contrast, used 82 per cent of their 35,460 allocation.

Ontario determined its first year of PAL allocations based on 2023 study permit levels, with exceptions for Algoma University and 13 colleges, including Conestoga, which received fewer permits.

Within the college sector, usage varied widely, with Humber distributing nearly all of its PALs, while Northern College used just 28 per cent. Northern, which had to shutter a private partnership as part of the federal policy changes, has since experienced layoffs, but the loss of international student has been broadly felt across Ontario’s college communities, with more than 10,000 faculty and staff let go and more than 600 college programs suspended or cancelled.

Among public universities, the University of Toronto handed out the largest number of PALs (6,165) in 2024, while the likes of Trent, Guelph, Ottawa and Waterloo universities used nearly all of their allocation. An outlier was Nipissing University, which used only 11 per cent of its PALs.

… What about this year?

In 2025, Ontario’s PAL allocation took a deep cut, falling to 181,590, which had to include, for the first time, graduate students.

Reflecting that, as well as the overall decrease, the province’s public colleges received 113,793 PALs while 57,685 went to universities.

The inclusion of PhD and master’s applicants meant, in some cases, individual numbers rose: U of T, which had 6,395 PALs the year before, received 12,338 this year.

Going into 2026, graduate students attending public institutions will be exempt from the PAL requirement but will be included in the overall cap allocation. So once again, the numbers for individual schools in 2026 will look different….

Source: Revealed: How international student spots are being distributed — unevenly — across Ontario

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These international students in Canada didn’t submit test scores because they weren’t asked to. Now, their work permits are refused

2026/01/07 1 Comment

Significant oversight in the online app. Lack of user testing or feedback? Students have a case for reconsideration:

…Over the last few months, immigration experts are seeing a growing number of international graduates like Xu being refused postgraduation work permits for failing to upload language test results, losing their legal status in Canada. They have to stop working immediately and face possible removal.

While many have asked officials for reconsideration, others have reapplied with the faint hope that they would get a second chance. 

“It may sound stupid, but I trusted the system, because I’ve been doing my own study permit and visa applications many times over the years,” said Xu. The Chinese student came here in 2016, first to improve her English before pursuing her master’s degree and PhD.

“There’s no reminder or alert in the system to tell you where to upload the language scores. It should not allow applicants to submit an application when a required document is missing.”

Only now did the 34-year-old woman learn, after the refusal, that the instruction on how to upload the test result had been buried on the Immigration Department website on a separate page that few would have spotted.

Students urge Minister Diab to intervene

An online petition has been launched to urge Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab to reinstate students’ refused applications.

Although the language requirement took effect in late 2024, Vancouver immigration lawyer Will Tao said the issue only emerged this fall due to excessive processing delays. It currently takes more than 210 days for work permit applications submitted inside Canada.

Despite what the Immigration Department called the “technical limitations” that prevent the application portal from installing a new direct upload field for language test proof, Tao is baffled as to why officials can’t just put a simple note there to inform applicants where to upload it.

“That appears only in a separate policy document that does require a lot of searching and digging to find,” he noted. “It’s all automated and now people are getting refused en masse for not uploading a document that you didn’t ask me to upload.”

(Soon after the Star’s inquiry to the Immigration Department about these refusals based on missing language proficiency proofs, Tao noted that officials had placed the upload information on three other webpages, but still not on the application portal.) 

Hundreds of permit applications refused

The department said it has received 162,000 postgraduation work permit applications since the inception of the mandatory language requirement; 815 had been refused up to September due to missing documents that may include the language proficiency proof…

Source: These international students in Canada didn’t submit test scores because they weren’t asked to. Now, their work permits are refused

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Federal government issued billions to students at private schools, data reveal

2025/12/10 Leave a comment

Sigh….:

The Canadian government gave billions in grants to students at private, for-profit schools, a practice some critics argue has rewarded some institutions with less-than-rigorous academic standards.

Since 2017, the federal government has granted $2.7 billion to students at those schools, according to data from Employment and Social Development Can­ada (ESDC). 

The amount awarded to the students has risen dramatically in recent years, meaning a growing share of taxpayer money is indirectly flowing to for-profit institutions. 

Last month’s federal budget announced the government will no longer offer grants to students at such schools, citing unspecified “integrity issues.”…

Source: Federal government issued billions to students at private schools, data reveal

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HESA: New Statscan Data on Students and Academic Staff

2025/12/09 Leave a comment

Of interest. College sector and business programs were the main abusers:

The student data is the slightly more interesting of the two, because it (finally) shows the system essentially at the height of the international student boom in the late fall of 2023 (Statscan student data is based on an October/November snapshot and therefore does not quite capture the full craziness of what went on in Ontario colleges, where most all international students were on an 8-month schedule with starts happening every four months and so therefore did not necessarily show up on Statscan scans). 

Unsurprisingly, total enrolments in Canadian postsecondary went up. A lot. 140,000 or so, which in absolute terms is the biggest single-year increase in post-secondary enrolments in Canadian history. But as figure 1 shows, that increase was a) highly concentrated in the college sector and b) largely due to international students.

Figure 1: Increase in Post-Secondary Enrolments by Sector and Source, Canada, 2023-24

Figure 2 breaks down the college increase by field of study.  Again, not a huge surprise: the biggest source of increase was business programs (cheap to deliver, required level of English not all that high); if anything, though I am surprised that so many programs saw an increase in enrolments: this result is actually substantially less business-centric than I would have expected.

Figure 2: Increase in College Enrolments by Field of Study, 2023-24

Source: New Statscan Data on Students and Academic Staff

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Here’s how much the cuts to Canada’s international students have hurt Ontario colleges and universities

2025/11/28 Leave a comment

Starting to get a better sense of the numbers and how governments created this problem through a mixture of underfunding of post-secondary education and over-reliance on international students:

Ontario colleges and universities have been hit with more than $4.6 billion in lost revenues amid the drastic cuts to international students, new post-secondary figures obtained by the Star show.

And with Ottawa just announcing even fewer foreign students for 2026, for universities alone the impact is expected to increase from the $2.1 billion blow they are already dealing with.

The new numbers have the province’s universities now warning they “cannot cut their way out of these growing fiscal challenges.”

…Universities have already cut $550 million in the last few years, mainly through program loss, fewer services and staff cuts, and many schools are staring down deficits this school year. 

Colleges have cut $1.8 billion in the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years, by cutting up to 10,000 jobs, and 600 programs as well as shuttering a number of campuses. …

Source: Here’s how much the cuts to Canada’s international students have hurt Ontario colleges and universities

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