ICYMI: Federal minister calls ‘garbage’ on Ontario’s complaints it was blindsided by international student cap

2024/03/04 Leave a comment

Not diplomatic but he is a relatively direct speaking politician and largely correct on this and some of this other comments like “puppy mill” colleges:

Immigration Minister Marc Miller said his government gave provinces ample notice that international student numbers would be capped and any suggestion otherwise is “complete garbage.”

This after Ontario’s College and Universities Minister Jill Dunlop told the London Free Press Monday she was “very disappointed” with what she said was the federal government’s “unilateral decision, without any consultation” to limit international students.

“This was dropped on us,” Dunlop said.

Miller announced a cap on international student numbers earlier this year. Universities and colleges across the country have brought in increasing numbers of international students in recent years, rising to nearly 900,000 this year.

On Tuesday, Miller rejected any suggestion provinces weren’t fully informed.

“That’s complete garbage,” he said. “We said quite clearly they need to get their houses in order. We spoke specifically about Ontario that has the largest number of international students. They should have known it. They’ve had auditor general reports. We’ve spoken quite publicly about it.”

Miller said his government invited provincial counterparts to meetings that they did not attend.

“It’s beneath me to share text messages with journalists, but the reality is that there was communication that just was never followed up on,” he told reporters….

Source: Federal minister calls ‘garbage’ on Ontario’s complaints it was blindsided by international student cap

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Cape Breton U tripled its international recruitment. Students say they pay the price.

2024/02/28 Leave a comment

A poster child for how education institutions have gone overboard in international student recruitment and numbers:

…Figures obtained through access to information legislation show that in 2018, Cape Breton University hired 53 agents to recruit international students. The next year, that number leapt to 142, and then in 2020 it hit 179. The school cut back to 102 recruitment agents in 2021, and then to 70 and 53 in the following years.

In 2018, the year Nguyen arrived from Vietnam, there were 1,982 full-time international students at the school, making up 48 per cent of the university’s population, figures from the Association of Atlantic Universities show. Now, there are nearly 7,000 international students at the school, three-quarters of the university’s population.

That’s more than a fifth of the entire population of Sydney, N.S., the coastal community where the university is located.

The university doubled its revenue in that time, from $69.1 million in 2018 to $139.5 million last year, according to financial statements available online. International students pay around $20,000 each year in tuition and fees at the school.

Nguyen said the community quickly became strained as more students arrived. Jobs became scarce and students crowded into rentals, many of which were in need of repair. CBC News reported that Rajesh Gollapudi, a business analytics student at the school, died in a fire in 2022 in a house he shared with seven other people. Court documents show the landlords have been charged with several fire safety infractions, and they are scheduled to enter a plea in March in provincial court.

Public buses between Cape Breton towns became packed with students, who had to live farther away and plan their days around sporadic rural bus schedules and long commutes, Nguyen said. Some live in their cars because they can’t find housing, or they live in Halifax and make the long drive to Cape Breton….

Source: Cape Breton U tripled its international recruitment. Students say they pay the price.

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Empty desks, international students and the quest for Canadian work permits 

2024/02/26 Leave a comment

Excellent reporting on what the private colleges and those in partnership with public colleges looks like in practise. More reporting like this is needed, and one has to ask where the federal and provincial governments were in allowing this to develop, along with those immigration advocates and academics who largely neglected this growth.

Major policy and program fail:

On a desolate industrial park off a highway north of Toronto stands the Vaughan campus of Flair College of Management and Technology. The boxy façade of the business college is adorned with images of students cooking, at a computer screen, or wearing virtual-reality goggles. Yet the only sign of real life is a woman smoking a cigarette on the steps next door. It is a school day in late January, but the college doors are locked.

Flair’s other campus is in a Brampton strip mall that advertises an optometrist, a dental hygienist and a vascular institute. This at least looks open.

There are two pieces of paper taped to a wall. One directs the visitor downstairs to a busy clinic offering “Immigration Medicals,” the other to Flair College, toward a suite in the basement where no one has quite bothered to move in. Only one room, as big as a decent-sized bedroom, resembles a classroom with chairs and a desk at the front, where a woman sits glued to her phone.

The women’s washroom has no soap or bathroom tissue. There are two television boxes and a desk in an empty office that looks as if it has never been used. One classroom is empty, except for a couple of desks stacked against the wall. There are no students, just a queue from the immigration medical clinic snaking into the corridor…

Source: Empty desks, international students and the quest for Canadian work permits 

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How Canada’s study permit cap will change where international students are coming from

2024/02/24 2 Comments

We shall see in the next few months through web, application and study permits issued data. To a certain extent, depending whether Ontario cracks down on the private colleges and public satellite colleges (where most of the abuse is), the effect on India may be relatively greater than for some other countries:

Canada’s new restrictions on study permits will change colleges’ and universities’ admission strategy, blunting the country’s recent effort to diversify its international student body, experts warn.

Canada has sought to bring in students from a host of countries to avoid having all its eggs in one basket should relations with one particular nation suddenly deteriorate. It has also been part of an effort to enrich the learning experience on campuses by bringing in diverse perspectives.

With the federal government reducing incoming international student intake by 35 per cent this year, post-secondary institutions, especially those in Ontario, are going to bet on recruiting students from countries with high study permit approval rates historically, to ensure admitted students can come, fill the class and pay tuition fees.

“Whoever colleges and universities are giving their letter of acceptance to, they are going to get the maximum enrolment and tuition dollar,” said immigration lawyer Zeynab Ziaie, whose firm handles a high international student caseload.

“The ways to minimize risk would be to, for the most part, avoid countries that are going to be typically high-risk.”

Under the cap, Ottawa will only process a limited number of study permit applications from institutions in each province. If an application is refused because officials don’t believe the applicant is genuine or has enough money to complete the study, that potential enrolment spot will be wasted.

Those high-risk applications are primarily from African countries, which have also seen the fastest international enrolment growth in Canada in recent years.

Immigration department data obtained by ApplyBoard showed Indian and Chinese students, accounted for 41 per cent and 10 per cent, respectively, of the one million study permit holders in Canada in 2023.

For years, the Canadian government as well as colleges and universities have invested in diversifying where students are coming from to lower the risks of suddenly losing enrolments due to geopolitical events, such as during Canada’s diplomatic spats with Saudi Arabia in 2018 and India in 2023….

Source: How Canada’s study permit cap will change where international students are coming from

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John Ivison: Warnings about too many international students were clear. The Liberals ignored them

2024/02/15 Leave a comment

Says it all:

…Miller has since reduced the number of international student visas by 35 per cent to around 364,000 and plans to limit the number of hours they can legally work to around 20. But that is the response of a government taking action after finding the stable empty and the horse long gone.

If Miller really wants to fix the problem, he should block students from working at all off campus and should make clear to everyone that there is only one route to permanent residency: that is, through the comprehensive ranking system that awards points based on skills, education, language ability and work experience. That way Canada will get the best and brightest through the front door.

To be clear, foreign workers and students are not to blame for all the housing market’s woes. Land costs and development charges have risen tenfold in the past two decades. Mortgage interest costs were up 30 per cent last year. All of these things operate independently of what is going on with the arrival of non-residents.

But as has been noted by innumerable experts, you can’t add a million-and-a-half people and only build 300,000 new homes.

It’s clear that the minister responsible was warned there would be unintended consequences to messing with the student program’s integrity — and there were.

There is a reason why Pierre Poilievre owns the housing issue, even after the Liberals have purloined some of his ideas.

That is because the Liberals are viewed as being culpable for creating the mess we’re in. Judging by Fraser’s testimony, they deserve the discredit.

source: John Ivison: Warnings about too many international students were clear. The Liberals ignored them

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Wells: The end of the high-value economy [immigration aspects]

2024/02/15 Leave a comment

The usual insightful and acerbic Paul Wells:

….We are going to go on a bit of a stroll today, so before I go further I should emphasize that I see nothing wrong with students from anywhere taking jobs as baristas or dog walkers. I think jobs at pubs or with Uber are a valuable part of the international student experience, and I congratulate Edvoy for their success in connecting young people with Canada’s community colleges and its gig-worker economy. 

But surely all this is useful context for the news that Sean Fraser was told in 2022, while he was immigration minister, that removing the 20-hour weekly cap on work international students could perform would “detract from the primary study goal of international students… circumvent the temporary foreign worker programs and give rise to further program integrity concerns with the international student program.” With that information in hand, Fraser took the 20-hour cap off anyway.

That’s because Fraser attached more value to the first thing the memo said, which was that increasing hours worked would help alleviate labour shortages. In other words, immediate post-COVID Canada was a place where the big problem was the limited number of people available to work. Bringing in more international students was a quick way to address that, and letting them work nearly full-time would help too. 

Ontario became Ground Zero for the rapid increase in enrolment for college students. That’s because Ontario premier Doug Ford was transfixed with what he called a “historic labour shortage” and eager to attract more people to the province — from other provinces, from outside Canada, seriously, wherever. I was told at the time that when Ford and Justin Trudeau met soon after the 2022 elections in Ontario and Quebec returned the incumbents, the PM bonded with Ford by complaining about Quebec’s François Legault behind Legault’s back, because Legault was still trying to limit immigration while Ford wanted the roof blown off. 

A certain creative laxity in international-student visa distribution permitted the overlap between Ford’s interests, Trudeau’s and those of Ontario’s community colleges: Ford could address his labour shortage, at least at the lower end of the skills ladder (I assume international students are often highly skilled and eager to increase their human capital, but in the meantime they’re dog walkers). Trudeau could goose the economy during a shaky period when a lot of people were worried about the prospects of recession. And Ontario’s colleges could enjoy a revenue bonanza, at a time when most other sources of funding for Ontario higher education are capped. Alex Usher’s been covering that part all along….

Source: The end of the high-value economy

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The Ontario college with the most international students comes out swinging against Canada’s reforms

2024/02/15 Leave a comment

Not unexpected. But one third in business programs suggest and three percent in health and life sciences suggest that it may be over stating its case:

The Ontario college that boasts the largest number of international students in the country is unapologetically touting its growth plan in an effort to address what it calls Canada’s “baby deficit.”

Kitchener-based Conestoga College, which has seen new approved study permits up 137 per cent over the last three years, said the prosperity of the local communities is threatened by the pressure on the labour supply — a result of a declining birthrate and an aging workforce — as well as the recent changes to Canada’s international education program.

“The college is responding to these shortages both emphatically and strategically,” Conestoga said in a report released Tuesday that explains its recent growth and the need to meet the region’s demand for a skilled labour force.

“The college has expanded its enrolment and attracted the level of international students necessary to compensate for the ‘baby deficit’ that will be the hallmark of the next several decades.”

The report, titled “The Conestoga Effect,” came in the wake of a two-year cap imposed by Immigration Minister Marc Miller recently to restrict the number of new study permits issued in order to rein in Canada’s fast-growing international student program, which he said has been used as a back entry into the country for jobs and permanent residence. 

According to data from the Immigration Department, Conestoga, a public college with 11 campuses in eight cities, has seen the fastest growth in new study permits received — 12,822 in 2021; 20,905 in 2022; and 30,395 in 2023 — and one of the highest volumes of study permits extended over the three-year period — 2,837, 4,629 and 6,760 respectively.

Those numbers have raised eyebrows and drawn criticisms of the college for running the operations like what Miller has described as “puppy mills,” which Conestoga president John Tibbits vehemently denied on Tuesday.

“I am happy with what we’ve done. And we would do the same thing again,” he told an audience at the unveiling of the report, which was the fourth in a series over two decades that started in 2003, to capture the impact of the institution on the local community and economy.

Source: The Ontario college with the most international students comes out swinging against Canada’s reforms

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Regg Cohn: How shamelessly has Doug Ford ground down Ontario’s colleges and universities? Let me count the ways

2024/02/14 Leave a comment

Excellent analysis, including how colleges are treated differently than universities and the resulting incentive for their more rapid growth in international students:

The education of Doug Ford comes at a high price.

Not for him — the premier is doing just fine.

But under his stewardship, post-secondary education has spiralled from crisis to catastrophe. It is a disaster of Ford’s own making, with implications that go far beyond Ontario’s colleges and universities.

Here’s the problem with the premier’s post-secondary playbook: He’s been playing with other people’s money — a shell game — while gambling on the outcomes.

What looked like a good deal for Ford has become a bad bet for the entire province. The chaos over surging foreign enrolments on campus, amped up by the premier, has created panicky headlines.

But if you dig a little deeper, the crisis has also created an unsavoury windfall for the province: A “head tax” on foreign students, on top of a shell game for colleges, which together buff up the provincial treasury by hundreds of millions of dollars.

That’s on top of the savings for Ford’s Progressive Conservatives by freezing funding for higher education in Ontario at a time of rising inflation (disclosure: I’m a senior fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University and also at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy).

Upon taking power in 2018, Ford ordered every post-secondary institution to cut tuition by 10 per cent — without making up the shortfall. Those fees have been frozen ever since, while government funding stagnated year after year — inflation be damned.

Ontario’s colleges, left to fend for themselves after the tuition cut and freeze, were encouraged to make up the difference by recruiting high-paying foreigners with abandon. The inflated cash flow propelled all but one of Ontario’s 24 colleges into sudden surpluses worth more than $660 million in 2022.

Conveniently, that windfall benefited Ford’s Tories because the colleges’ balance sheets show up on the books of the provincial treasury. That’s a sweet deal for Ford and his surplus-addicted finance minister, Peter Bethlenfalvy.

But the province’s universities, most of which resisted the temptation to feast on foreign students — are now in dire financial straits, with 10 of 23 now running deficits.

Happily for Ford’s Tories, those university deficits are seemingly not the province’s problem — neither fiscally nor politically. That’s because any university’s red ink doesn’t show up on the province’s balance sheet, since they are deemed autonomous institutions (unlike colleges which report directly to the government).

It’s an accident of history that manifests as an accounting quirk. But it amounts to a handy political payoff for the premier.

Moreover, Ford’s Tories have been shamelessly milking foreign students with a de facto “head tax,” which is dressed up as an international “recovery fee” for every warm body lured to Ontario. It’s not a massive amount — more than $140 million a year — but it’s profiteering all the same.

Campuses are at the breaking point. Communities are at the boiling point over housing shortages exacerbated by an unplanned foreign influx.

Forced into action by the province’s inaction, the federal government imposed a cap on foreign students and work permits last month. With cascading abuses, Ottawa had little choice but to act — Ontario broke the system, and now Queen’s Park has to take responsibility for fixing it.

The boom will fall especially hard on Ontario, which already fills 51 per cent of the permits with only 39 per cent of the population. And it will hit universities harder than colleges and private educational institutions, which cornered an outsized share of permits driven by a strategy of greedy growth.

Will the government play hardball with universities when it comes to those scarce international permits, in order to protect the foreign cash flow of colleges who are already Ford’s preferred partners for his policy of promoting the skilled trades?

Last year, it seemed the premier had seen the light. The Tories set up a fancy-sounding Blue Ribbon Panel on Post-secondary Education that quickly focused on fixing the distorted bottom line with straightforward advice:

Stop cutting tuition and stop freezing funding.

“The sector’s financial sustainability is currently at serious risk, and it will take a concerted effort to right the ship,” its report warned in November.

The outside panel recommended a one-time tuition hike of five per cent in 2024-25, followed by increases of two per cent (or higher, tied to inflation) thereafter. By the panel’s calculations, it would take a tuition increase of 25 per cent to make up for lost monies — politically unpalatable, so it urged the Ford government to increase funding by about 10 per cent with subsequent increases of at least two per cent (plus inflation).

Its report urged the government to confront its growing addiction by moving to “reduce or eliminate the student recovery fee for international students paid by colleges,” amounting to $750 a year.

Ford’s reaction? Pull out the populist playbook:

“I just don’t believe this is the time to go into these (Ontario) students’ pockets, especially the ones that are really struggling, and ask for a tuition increase,” he told reporters last month, calling instead for more “efficiencies.”

Let’s not confuse efficiencies with distortions. By profiting from the penury of post-secondary institutions — boosting his own bottom line while starving universities and contorting colleges — Ford is giving the province a costly lesson about false economies.

Source: How shamelessly has Doug Ford ground down Ontario’s colleges and universities? Let me count the ways

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Minister was warned lifting international student work limit could undermine program

2024/02/14 Leave a comment

More on the warning and former Minister Fraser’s policy failure:

Allowing international students to work more than 20 hours a week could distract from their studies and undermine the objective of temporary foreign worker programs, public servants warned the federal government in 2022.

The caution came in documents prepared for former immigration minister Sean Fraser as Ottawa looked at waiving the restriction on the number of hours international students could work off-campus — a policy the Liberals eventually implemented.

The Canadian Press obtained the internal documents with an access-to-information request.

Waiving the cap could help alleviate labour shortages, a memorandum for the minister conceded, but it could also have other unintended consequences.

“While a temporary increase in the number of hours international students can work off-campus could help address these shortages, this could detract from the primary study goal of international students to a greater emphasis on work, circumvent the temporary foreign worker programs and give rise to further program integrity concerns with the international student program,” the memo said.

Canada’s bloated international student program has been heavily scrutinized in recent months as part of a larger critique of Liberal immigration policies that have fuelled rapid population growth and contributed to the country’s housing crunch.

That scrutiny led the federal government to introduce a cap on study permits over the next two years, as it tries to get a handle on the program.

More than 900,000 foreign students had visas to study in Canada last year, which is more than three times the number 10 years ago.

Critics have questioned the dramatic spike in international student enrolments at shady post-secondary institutions and have flagged concerns about the program being a backdoor to permanent residency.

The memo said removing the limit for off-campus work would be in “stark contrast” to the temporary foreign worker programs, which requires employers to prove that they need a migrant worker and that no Canadian or permanent resident is available to do the job.

Fraser ultimately announced in October 2022 that the federal government would waive the restriction until the end of 2023 to ease labour shortages across the country.

The waiver only applied to students currently in the country or those who had already applied, in order to not incentivize foreign nationals to obtain a study permit only to work in Canada.

In December, Immigration Minister Marc Miller extended the policy until April 30, 2024 and floated the idea of setting the cap at 30 hours a week thereafter.

In an interview with The Canadian Press on Monday, Miller said he extended the waiver because he didn’t want to interfere with students’ work arrangements in the middle of an academic year.

“What I really didn’t want to do is impact students in a current year that have made their financial calculations about how they will sustain themselves and how they will be able to pay for the tuition and rent and food,” Miller said.

Miller said internal work by the department shows more than 80 per cent of international students are currently working more than 20 hours a week.

Waiving the number of hours international students could work was the right call given the labour shortages Canada was facing, but the policy was never meant to be permanent, he said.

Job vacancies soared to more than a million in the second quarter of 2022, but have steadily decreased since then as the economy slows.

Miller said he’s now considering making a permanent change to the cap that would set it somewhere between 20 and 40 hours a week.

“It’s not credible that someone can work 40 hours and do a proper program,” Miller said.

He said the goal is to come up with a cap that gives students the ability to get good work experience and help them pay the bills, all while not undermining their studies.

“So what does a reasonable number of hours look like for someone here studying, knowing that they are paying three to four times, sometimes five times the price of a domestic student?” Miller said.

“I think that’s above 20 hours.”

Source: Minister was warned lifting international student work limit could undermine program

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‘Labour shortage is real.’ Canadian retailers push back on Ottawa’s foreign labour cap

2024/02/12 1 Comment

The next interest group opposing caps:

Canada’s immigration minister is getting pushback from companies that heavily rely on foreign labour following the federal government’s announcement that it will cap international student visas.

Marc Miller said companies, including “big-box stores,” are already lobbying against the planned reduction in permitted work hours for international students in comments made Tuesday to BNN Bloomberg.

“Some of the big-box stores, some of the businesses that have international students, have pushed relatively hard to preserve the 40-hour work week,” Miller said. “Some student groups call for it as well because a lot of employers want you to be able to commit to more than 20 hours.”

The Retail Council of Canada — which represents 45,000 store fronts across the country, including Canada’s largest grocers, Walmart and Amazon Canada — in an email said that “the labour shortage is real, and finding people has never been more difficult.” Many of the big box stores the RCC represents employ international students, said spokesperson Michelle Wasylyshen.

Source: ‘Labour shortage is real.’ Canadian retailers push back on Ottawa’s foreign labour cap

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