Randall Denley: Time for Ford to act on Ontario’s reliance on international students for post-secondary funding

2023/08/26 Leave a comment

Good and needed reminder that the provinces and their education institutions are largely responsible for the rapid increase in international students, with the federal government largely automatically facilitating visas:

A light bulb has finally come on in Justin Trudeau’s cabinet. Dim thought that bulb may be, it has sufficient power to illuminate a glaring weakness in how Ontario funds post-secondary education.

Sean Fraser, the new federal housing minister, offered the opinion this week that the 807,260 international students in Canada are putting pressure on the Canadian housing market. That’s not terribly surprising, since the number of international students has more than doubled since the Liberals took power. It’s also a problem that Fraser failed to address when he was immigration minister.

While it’s gratifying to see the federal Liberals tentatively identifying a link between the number of people flowing into the country and the shortage of housing, it’s Ontario Premier Doug Ford who really has to wake up.

Ford talks non-stop about the housing crisis and is willing to do anything to build more housing, but his own government’s policies have made the problem worse. Its failure to properly fund post-secondary is the root cause of the burgeoning international student population in Ontario, where about half the national total resides.

This is a problem Ford inherited, then made worse. Under the previous Liberal government tuition fees rose steadily as universities scrambled to cover costs not met by provincial funding. When first elected, Ford cut tuition fees by 10 per cent and his government has frozen them ever since.

That was great for students, not so great for universities and colleges. To make up the public funding shortfall, universities and colleges turned increasingly to international students, who pay much higher fees than Canadians, up to four times as much.

In effect, the Ford government and the universities and colleges reached a tacit agreement. The post-secondary institutions would stop fussing about underfunding in exchange for the government supporting an unlimited flow of international students.

Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk has highlighted the overreliance on international student fees in two reports. In December 2021, Lysyk found that Ontario’s colleges received 68 per cent of their tuition fees from international students. That’s what happens when a Canadian student pays $3,228 and an international student $14,306 for the same education. In 2022, she determined that international students, about 14 per cent of the student body, were paying 45 per cent of university tuition fees.

Some differential for international students is justified, but only enough to make up what the province covers for homegrown students. Ontario’s fees are exorbitant.

In effect, Ontario has turned its post-secondary sector into an international training business. As a result, the sector has expanded in its search for revenue, flooding the province with students who require housing.

Despite the obvious pressure this creates on housing, the Ontario government has been enthusiastic about the burgeoning Ontario student population. Not only do the international students subsidize the education of students from Ontario, they provide a source of cheap labour while they study here. Even better, the government hopes that many of them will stay in Ontario after they graduate.

Ford is caught between conflicting problems. There is a labour shortage and immigration seems like an obvious way to solve it, but a larger population increases demand for housing and health care beyond the province’s capacity to provide it. Ford has struggled to connect those two dots, championing population growth while pretending the province can handle it.

Whatever the perceived benefits, Ontario’s heavy reliance on international students’ tuition dollars to support its colleges and universities is unwise, a point made compellingly in an analysis by the Canadian Federation of Students.

It is also a problem that will be expensive to fix. The Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations says that provincial funding covers only 33 per cent of university costs. Bringing Ontario per-student funding up to the average of the rest of Canada would cost $12.9 billion over five years, the professors estimate. For context, Ontario’s base program spending for the entire post-secondary sector this year is $12.1 billion.

Ontario has taken one small step toward rationality. Earlier this year, it appointed a “blue-ribbon panel” of academic and business leaders to provide the government with advice on making the post-secondary sector financially stable. Raising government support and cutting reliance on international students would be two obvious recommendations. The panel is expected to report within the next four weeks.

The Ontario government is certainly not going to stop the flow of international students, nor should it. What it needs to do is reduce the system’s reliance on those students’ fees by reducing their numbers and making up the difference itself. That would help both the housing market and the stability of post-secondary education.

Randall Denley is an Ottawa journalist, author and former Ontario PC candidate. Contact him at randalldenley1@gmail.com

Source: Randall Denley: Time for Ford to act on Ontario’s reliance on international students for post-secondary funding

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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)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Gerson: Want to ease Canada’s housing crisis? Let’s start by being responsible about international student visas

2023/08/19 Leave a comment

Gerson nails it. But goes beyond international students given housing and other pressures by increasing numbers temporary foreign workers and permanent residents:

Desperate calls by schools to urge local homeowners to rent out their rooms; students paying $650 a month to live three-to-a room in college towns boasting monthly rents upward of $2,000; a viral TikTok video purports to show an international student living under a bridge in Scarborough, Ont.

Housing is a complicated issue. It will take co-ordination, cash, and time to fix. But in the short term, there is at least one glaringly obvious – if surely controversial – way to help ease the challenge of finding affordable rental accommodation: We need to stop issuing so many international student visas.

Of course, this is not going to solve the housing problem in and of itself. But anybody who thinks that our desire to bring in as many fruitful international students as possible isn’t contributing to the housing crunch hasn’t looked at the figures lately.

Canada was home to more than 800,000 international students as of the end of last year. That number, which began growing under the Conservatives, has continued to increase at an extraordinary pace since the Liberals took office; it has roughly doubled since 2015.

International students, who actually dwarf the population of temporary foreign workers at the moment, comprise about 17 percent of university enrolment in this country. Further, the majority of those students are opting for schools where housing is exceptionally expensive and difficult to find – namely, in big cities in Ontario and British Columbia.

Why this is happening is fairly obvious. Firstly, the federal government is trying to use study as a method of attracting top international talent. Between 2010 and 2016, 47 per cent of international students who graduated from a Canadian postsecondary institution stayed in Canada.

Secondly, international students are cash cows. Tuition fees for domestic students are regulated by provincial governments. Not so for their international counterparts, which makes bringing in foreign learners incredibly lucrative for perpetually cash-strapped schools and universities. (The real growth is increasingly not just from universities, but also from private colleges.)

And these visas don’t come with anything else – that is, the schools don’t need to provide housing for the students they bring in. Student housing is annoying and expensive and a pain to manage, and most schools know that, which is why they are not particularly keen to do it. That’s why Canada’s stock of purpose-built student housing lags dramatically behind our counterparts in the United States and Europe.

This isn’t an isolated problem, either. These kids need to live somewhere, and their desperation ripples through the broader housing market, driving up demand for affordable rentals and even single-family housing.

I spoke recently with Mike Moffatt at the Richard Ivey School of Business, and he provided me with some research on the subject – including links to his own recently published report offering advice to governments on how to address the housing crisis.

Ontario alone needs to build 1.5 million housing units by 2031 to keep up with expected growth led by immigration and, yes, by international students. (The province is behind on its commitment to do so.)

And while there will be no quick fix, no silver bullet – at least one answer is painfully obvious, no?

Granting an ever-growing number of student visas to people we know will struggle to find housing is unethical at best and fraudulent at worst.

We need to dramatically cut the number of student visas, especially for private colleges, some of which are offering a quality of education that is less than desirable. We then need to tie student visas to housing availability – that is, a university shouldn’t be allowed to take on more international students than it can house in that community, for the duration of that person’s time studying in Canada. And we need to ensure schools don’t respond to this edict by pushing out less profitable domestic students, which only displaces the problem from one class of student to another.

That means we need to incentivize building more affordable rental housing. There will be a role for federal and provincial governments in this effort, perhaps in co-ordination with the private sector, to address this critical need as quickly as possible.

But I don’t see any way to address this problem unless we temporarily curtail the number of international students. The federal government needs to become far more restrictive about that particular avenue for immigration, and quickly.

If that edict seems extreme, I would remind everybody that reducing international student visas to a more manageable baseline would actually be among the easier levers to pull to relieve pressure in our housing market. Everything else from here on in is going to get much more difficult.

Jen Gerson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.

Source: Want to ease Canada’s housing crisis? Let’s start by being responsible about international student visas

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Housing crisis: Feds stick by immigration plan, rethink international student flows

2023/08/17 Leave a comment

Possible partial pivot but limited to international students, Minister Miller linking this to fraud concerns, not permanent residents and temporary workers.

Kind of an interesting contradiction in the article between “pace of population growth, facilitated by immigration, is making the housing crisis worse” and “Most experts agree that the root causes of this housing shortage are unrelated to immigration.”

The alarm bells are becoming bull horns: Canada’s housing supply isn’t keeping up with the rapid rate of population growth.

Academics, commercial banks and policy thinkers have all been warning the federal government that the pace of population growth, facilitated by immigration, is making the housing crisis worse.

“The primary cause for (the) housing affordability challenge in Canada is our inability to build more housing that is in line with the increase in population,” said Murtaza Haider, a professor of data science and real estate management at Toronto Metropolitan University.

A TD report released in late July also warned that “continuing with a high-growth immigration strategy could widen the housing shortfall by about a half-million units within just two years.”

But the Liberals are doubling down on their commitment to bring more people into the country, arguing that Canada needs high immigration to support the economy and build the homes it desperately needs.

“Looking at the (immigration) levels that we have recently approved as a cabinet (and) as a government, we can’t afford currently to reduce those numbers,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

That’s because Canada’s aging population risks straining public finances, he said, as health-care needs rise and the tax base shrinks.

A report by Statistics Canada published in April 2022 finds the country’s working population has never been older, with more than one in five people close to retirement.

At the same time, Canada’s fertility rate hit a record low of 1.4 children per woman in 2020.

The TD report, co-authored by the commercial bank’s chief economist Beata Caranci, notes that economists are the ones who have been warning of the economic consequences of Canada’s aging population.

“A ramp-up in skilled-based immigration offered a solution. Government policies have delivered, but now the question is whether the sudden swing in population has gone too far, too fast,” the report said.

The federal government’s latest immigration levels plan, released last fall, would see Canada welcome 500,000 immigrants annually by 2025.

In contrast, the immigration target for 2015 was under 300,000.

Although the half-million figure has caught considerable attention, it’s not just higher immigration targets that are driving the surge in population.

Canada is also experiencing a boom in the number of temporary residents who are coming to the country, which includes international students and temporary foreign workers.

In 2022, Canada’s population grew by more than one million people, a number that included 607,782 non-permanent residents and 437,180 immigrants.

Miller said in the interview that the federal government is open to reconsidering international student enrolments, particularly amid fraud concerns.

Earlier this year, hundreds of people were suspected of being caught in a fraud scheme that saw immigration agents issue fake acceptance letters to get students into Canada.

“There is fraud across the system that we are going to have to clamp down on,” Miller said.

The increased scrutiny of Canada’s immigration policies and population growth comes as the country faces a housing affordability crisis caused in large part by a shortage of homes.

Most experts agree that the root causes of this housing shortage are unrelated to immigration. Red tape and anti-development sentiment at the municipal level, for example, can lead to major delays in projects.

Federal tax incentives that helped spur purpose-built rental constructions were rolled back decades ago, leading to a massive shortage in rentals that has slowly built up over time.

Given these existing challenges, experts are concerned strong population growth will add fuel to the fire.

BMO published an analysis in May that estimated that for every one per cent of population growth, housing prices rise by three per cent.

The rebound of the Canadian real estate market this year also shows how immigration is helping to maintain demand for housing, despite decades-high interest rates.

In contrast, the immigration target for 2015 was under 300,000.

Although the half-million figure has caught considerable attention, it’s not just higher immigration targets that are driving the surge in population.

Canada is also experiencing a boom in the number of temporary residents who are coming to the country, which includes international students and temporary foreign workers.

In 2022, Canada’s population grew by more than one million people, a number that included 607,782 non-permanent residents and 437,180 immigrants.

Miller said in the interview that the federal government is open to reconsidering international student enrolments, particularly amid fraud concerns.

Earlier this year, hundreds of people were suspected of being caught in a fraud scheme that saw immigration agents issue fake acceptance letters to get students into Canada.

“There is fraud across the system that we are going to have to clamp down on,” Miller said.

The increased scrutiny of Canada’s immigration policies and population growth comes as the country faces a housing affordability crisis caused in large part by a shortage of homes.

Most experts agree that the root causes of this housing shortage are unrelated to immigration. Red tape and anti-development sentiment at the municipal level, for example, can lead to major delays in projects.

Federal tax incentives that helped spur purpose-built rental constructions were rolled back decades ago, leading to a massive shortage in rentals that has slowly built up over time.

Given these existing challenges, experts are concerned strong population growth will add fuel to the fire.

BMO published an analysis in May that estimated that for every one per cent of population growth, housing prices rise by three per cent.

The rebound of the Canadian real estate market this year also shows how immigration is helping to maintain demand for housing, despite decades-high interest rates.

Source: Housing crisis: Feds stick by immigration plan, rethink international …

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , ,

Record levels of international students straining Canada’s housing supply further

2023/08/12 Leave a comment

Not much new but confirms problems. Bit rich of Universities Canada to state that “Solving the housing crisis will require collaboration among all levels of government…” while ignoring the complicity of universities in increasing demand:

Record numbers of international students coming to Canada is making the already inflated cost of housing worse, said Steve Pomeroy, a policy research consultant and senior research fellow at Carleton University’s centre for urban research.

The biggest strain on Canada’s housing market, he said, isn’t only the rising rate of permanent residents, with more than 400,000 permanent residents in 2022, and the Liberal government determined to hit 500,000 a year in the next couple of years. Those coming here seeking temporary residence, either temporary foreign workers or international students, are fuelling rental price increases.

“Temporary foreign workers and students are going to be renters, as opposed to owners,” he said.

Average rents nationally jumped more than 10 per cent last year and are expected to rise again this year, although rents in hotter markets, such as Toronto and Vancouver, are up significantly more.

Data released earlier this year by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) show 807,750 international students with valid student visas studying at Canadian post-secondary institutions as of the end of 2022. At 30-per-cent higher than the 617,315 students in 2021, it’s now at the highest level it’s ever been.

With the exception of 2020, where numbers were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada’s complement of international students historically saw between six to nine per cent growth annually.

Pomeroy said universities are driving the numbers as a way to generate more revenue, because they can charge international students much higher tuitions.

“In Ontario, university tuition fees are frozen, grants are frozen, but the only variable that universities have to generate new revenues is international students, so they naturally go and chase those,” he said.

More visiting students, he said, create inordinate demand at the very bottom of the rental market, where there’s already a tight market for low-income workers, fixed-income seniors and those who rely on social assistance.

Benjie Rustia, an official with an international immigration and study agency located near the Philippine capital of Manila, said his international-student clients know that coming here means fighting a tight entry-level rental market.

“They are well informed by their relatives or friends in Canada,” he told the National Post.

“Making informed decisions is the basic aspect for the process for international students, and are based on thorough research and understanding.”

Late last month, news of an international student from India found living under an east Toronto bridge brought attention to the problem, and highlighted concerns from advocates that Canada’s affordability crisis is rendering increasing numbers of foreign students homeless.

Most international students coming to Canada flock to Ontario, which in 2022 saw over 411,000 foreign students enrolled in the province’s post-secondary institutions.

British Columbia ranked second with 164,000 students last year, followed by Quebec with 93,000, Alberta with 43,000 and Manitoba with 22,000.

While India’s 319,130 international students rank as Canada’s biggest cohort, followed by China with 100,075, the Philippines is seeing big bumps in the number of their students coming here.

Canada issued 25,295 study permits to Filipino students to study here in 2022, a 76-per-cent increase from the 14,355 visas issued to students from that country in 2021.

As of June 2023, 11,400 permits were issued to students from the Philippines.

Rustia said his clients typically search for schools that offer on-campus residence living or look for schools near where they can stay with friends and relatives already in the area.

News reports on Wednesday described long wait-lists for on-campus housing at Calgary universities, with 740 students waiting for housing at the University of Calgary, and the city’s Mount Royal University establishing a waiting list for their 950 dorm rooms for the first time in the school’s history.

Solving this problem, Pomeroy said, could be done by striking partnerships between schools, governments and developers.

“If the government was smart, it would say ‘OK, we’re causing the problem by giving out these visas to international students, how can we solve this problem,’” he said.

“Let’s work with the universities, let’s work with the private developers for some incentives and stimulus.”

He suggested using existing programs, such as the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s rental construction financing initiative — which provides low-cost loans to encourage rental apartment projects — to encourage student-centred rental construction to keep the pressure of local residential rental markets.

“You can wait until folks get displaced and they’re in the homeless shelter and we intervene and provide supportive housing and wraparound services to help them get out of shelters at significantly high cost, or we could build 1,000 units of student housing with no cost to government,” Pomeroy said.

A statement to the National Post from Universities Canada, a post-secondary institution lobby group, agreed the federal government should be doing more to address the issue.

“Solving the housing crisis will require collaboration among all levels of government, and universities remain willing partners in these efforts,” wrote interim president Philip Landon.

“Universities Canada urges the federal government to meet its commitments, as set out in the National Housing Strategy, to reduce homelessness, construct new homes and provide Canadians with access to affordable housing that meets their needs.”

Canada’s universities, he wrote, are doing more to approve and build more on-campus housing, as well as provide resources to help students access off-campus living space, as well as developing “innovative housing models” to relieve local rental market pressures.

Emails to Immigration Minister Marc Miller went unacknowledged.

Tom Kmiec, the Conservative party’s immigration and citizenship critic, said that the current government’s housing and immigration policies are leaving newcomers on the streets.

“More homes were being built in 1972 when Canada’s population was half of what it is today,” he said in a statement.

“The Liberal government has failed to deliver on their housing promises and failed to come anywhere close to building the number of houses we need, leaving Canada short millions of homes and Canadians struggling to afford a place to live.”

Source: Record levels of international students straining Canada’s housing supply further

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