Immigration article of interest March 2026

2026/04/01 Leave a comment

Articles and opinions related to immigration that I found of interest in March (bit overly long):

  • IRCC Management/OAG International Students
  • General
  • Quebec perspectives
  • Refugees and Asylum Seekers
  • Other

IRCC Management/OAG International Students

Understandably, considerable coverage and commentary over the lack of management and integrity of the international student program contained in the OAG report. A key question, which we will probably never know for sure, is whether public service identified risks to the political level, and if so, was any critical advice toned down, and if so how much, as it moved up to the deputy level. And of course while the federal government is responsible, this does not let provincial governments, education institutions and business communities for pushing for higher levels:

Canada’s international student program blasted by auditor for failing to address ‘integrity concerns’

Canada’s Immigration Department failed to crack down on study permit applicants and holders flagged for potential fraud and non-compliance — and did not even know if those with expired permits had left the country, a government audit has found.

Between 2023 and 2024, more than 153,000 post-secondary international students were identified as potentially non-compliant with study permit rules, but officials had funding to probe only 2,000 cases annually, according to a report released Monday by the Office of the Auditor General of Canada.

The department began 4,057 investigations, but 41 per cent of these cases could not be closed because the students did not respond; another 50 cases were identified as non-compliant and requiring further follow-up.

“While there were some adjustments made to improve the integrity of the program, what’s concerning for me is that the department isn’t acting on the information that it has,” Auditor General Karen Hogan told a news conference.

“There are so many things that were raised by the department themselves, and then no follow-through.”

The international student program has been under close scrutiny since 2023, when borders reopened after the pandemic and international enrolment surged past one million. Runaway growth in the temporary resident population — including foreign workers and asylum seekers — was blamed for the affordable housing crisis, straining public resources such as health care and rising unemployment.

It prompted then prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government to cap the number of international student applications and reduce new study permits issued by 35 per cent in 2024 and another 10 per cent in 2025. New measures were also introduced to tighten eligibility for postgraduation work permits, address fraud and strengthen program integrity.

The audit findings, however, don’t appear to help boost public confidence in these reforms.

“There’s enough to still frighten people about what’s going on and question the integrity of our immigration system,” said York University Prof. Roopa Trilokekar, who focuses on government policy on international education.

The fast-growing international student program was the result of aggressive recruiting by the post-secondary education sector due to years of provincial underfunding and by unregulated foreign agents looking to profit from signing up students.

Under Ottawa’s two-step immigration pathways that favour applicants with Canadian education credentials and work experience, migrants increasingly look at studying in Canada as a back door to working and earning permanent residence here.

According to the audit, officials identified 800 approved study permits issued between 2018 and 2023 where applicants had either used fraudulent documentation or misrepresented information to gain entry to Canada. Most of them later applied for other immigration permits once in the country, and half have been approved.

“The absence of having a warning or something on their file to say fraudulent documentation or misrepresentation was used in the initial application means you weren’t able to then apply rigour on the second application,” Hogan cautioned….

Source: Canada’s international student program blasted by auditor for failing to address ‘integrity concerns’

Globe editorial: Ottawa hasn’t learned its lesson on immigration

…Lena Metlege Diab, the immigration minister, has said she accepts the Auditor-General’s recommendations. She needs to clearly articulate a path to return the international student program to its original purpose – not as a ticket to citizenship, but to allow foreigners to study here temporarily. 

Canada shouldn’t promote study permits as a pathway to permanent residency, and it should restrict the hours students can work off-campus. While the lax issuing of student visas in recent years has been useful to employers seeking low-cost labour, and post-secondary institutions keen to fill budget holes, it has distorted the program.

The immigration department needs to be able to quickly root out cases of misuse and fraud to ensure the system’s integrity. This requires closer scrutiny of renewals of people already in the country and better coordination with the CBSA.

After years of mismanagement of the immigration file, the Liberals have lost any benefit of the doubt. Immigration is an essential ingredient in Canada’s success, but it can’t be run on the honour system.

Source: Ottawa hasn’t learned its lesson on immigration

With hindsight, former immigration minister says he would have capped international students sooner

Justice Minister Sean Fraser, who was in charge of immigration during some of the years Auditor General Karen Hogan found instances of fraud in Canada’s international student program, said with hindsight, he would have acted sooner to fundamentally change it.

The Opposition Conservatives have been calling for his resignation, along with that of current Immigration Minister Lena Diab and Fraser’s immediate successor Marc Miller, from Prime Minister Mark Carney’s cabinet.

“With the benefit of hindsight, I would have liked to actually change the program fundamentally and say the federal government is placing a cap on this, and letting provinces allocate their share of the cap to different institutions,” Fraser told CBC News on Wednesday.

However, he also said the federal government was negotiating as part of “a good-faith relationship with the provinces who were requesting additional access to immigration programs at the time.”…

Source: With hindsight, former immigration minister says he would have capped international students sooner

General

Clark: Time to plan for the return of sane immigration

Reasonable and need for a longer term immigration and population policy, one that avoids the mistakes of the “more the merrier” approach that got us here:

…Most importantly, the system to select economic immigrants, which should aim to recruit highly productive newcomers that raise Canada’s standard of living, has been balkanized with a series of programs to fill alleged labour shortages, often with lower-wage workers.

Immigration means recruiting a big part of the population of the future. It can make the lives of Canadians born today dramatically richer or poorer. 

Now, the recruitment is essentially on hold – probably for two more years. The short-term goal is to pause population growth. In the meantime, there is a compelling need to focus on what immigration should be over the long term, and plan for it. 

The country is going to need it.

Source: Time to plan for the return of sane immigration

Globe editorial: The two Tory mindsets on immigration

Captures the dynamic:

…But if the Conservatives need added motivation, here are two: the demagogic tone makes it all too easy for the Liberals to ignore the long list of reforms that the Opposition has proposed, and makes it much harder for any centrist voter to contemplate supporting the Tories.

Many of the reforms proposed by the Conservatives are worth debate, including but not limited to: closing a loophole that courts have used to avoid the deportation of migrants convicted of serious criminal offences; barring asylum claims from anyone who is a national of the European Union or a G7 country, or who transited through such a country to come to Canada; and greater transparency from the immigration system. The party does not lack for ideas; it does not need to indulge in weak rhetorical legerdemain.

And there’s no need to confect issues if embarrassing the Liberals is your goal; the unadorned facts will get the job done. Such as the backlog of asylum claims sitting at 299,960 at the end of January, down fractionally from the record high of 300,154 at the end of 2025. At that rate, the backlog should be cleared sometime in 2155.

What has happened that one-sixth of all new asylum claims in 2025 were from just one country, India – a flawed democracy, but a democracy nonetheless? Why is it that asylum claims from India have surged from 379 in 2015 to 17,835 last year, an astonishing 4,505 per cent rise? And why is it that just 22 per cent of asylum claims from Indian nationals that were finalized in 2025 were successful, about a third of the overall success rate?

Those questions, and many others on the immigration file, are serious issues that the Liberals should be compelled to address. The thoughtful Conservative Party could do that, if the rage-baiting Conservative Party would just get out of the way.

Source: The two Tory mindsets on immigration

Rempel Garner: Big Immigration must be reined in. Parliamentary power must be restored.

General tendency over the years to diminish the distinction between citizens and non-citizens (e.g., public service employment, Iranian victims of Iran’s shooting down of a Ukrainian airline) but agree that this decision goes too far and will likely further reduce public confidence in immigration:

…But given the hull-buckling groans emanating from most Canadian social welfare programs, the deep deficits most Canadian governments are running, and the disarray that Canada’s immigration system is already in, Prime Minister Mark Carney has a duty to prevent ideologically-homogenous activists from using the Kanyinda framework to block reasonable reforms or make the system even more dysfunctional than it already is.

There are many other reasons to prevent further blurring of the distinction between citizen and non-citizen using the Kanyinda framework. It will be virtually impossible for any level of government to disincentivize abuse of the asylum system if there are endless legal options for unverified claimants (or outright fraudsters) to access social services they were never intended to receive. Blurred boundaries on who is eligible to receive benefits will, beyond the obvious sustainability problems, make it even harder to prioritize those truly vulnerable groups.

For many members of the public, this lack of distinction will be perceived as a lack of fairness. In turn, there will be even less public appetite to extend social welfare benefits to asylum claimants, or for immigration writ large. Further legal erosion of the difference between citizen and non-citizen will only serve to continue to diminish the value of Canadian citizenship and accelerate the fragmentation of our already diffuse national identity.

Perhaps most importantly, Kanyinda adds a thick layer of judicial overreach to an existing spread of rulings that have already severely eroded both Parliamentary supremacy in setting immigration law and the federal government’s ability to enforce it. Changes in 2012, which prevented non-citizens who made fraudulent asylum claims from receiving taxpayer-funded supplemental health benefits (like vision care) while awaiting removal from the country, were almost immediately struck down by the Federal Court (R. v. Pham, 2013 SCC 15). This led to the now-frequent practice of judges giving more lenient sentences to non-citizens convicted of serious crimes in order to avoid consequences for their immigration status.

Parliamentary Committee testimony during the review of the immigration provisions in the current Bill C-12 suggested its reforms would immediately be challenged in court by Big Immigration. Justice Wagner’s tone in Kanyinda suggests that this lobby will be successful. Allowing this trend to go unchecked by the federal government will only further engrain the Canadian public’s sense that they are losing control, and in turn, further erode support for immigration. It will also suggest that the federal Liberals’ willingness to prevent asylum system abuse only goes so far as the court’s willingness to accept their reforms.

At present, Canadian immigration law and Canadian public support for immigration is predicated upon the principle that it is legal, fair and necessary to treat different non-citizens differently than citizens for the purposes of immigration selection and entry into Canada. This concept is reinforced by Section 91(25) of the Constitution Act, 1867, which gives Canada’s Parliament the main power to set immigration laws.

And so the public expects that they can turn to and rely on the federal government and Parliament to both support a strong Canadian national identity, manage a fair and orderly immigration system, and secure our nation’s borders. But the Kanyinda framework shows that Canada’s Supreme Court is willing to fixate on the increasingly tone-deaf voices of Big Immigration and directly challenge these foundational principles.

The Charter has a built-in fail-safe for potential extreme situations such as these, and the government and Parliament have other tools at their disposal to rein in an overzealous judiciary.

It’s now up to Mark Carney to provide clarity on how much more judicially-inspired immigration dysfunction his government will tolerate before he directs it to act.

Let’s pray that his patience has boundaries, and that the judiciary and Big Immigration doesn’t further test their limits.

Source: Big Immigration must be reined in. Parliamentary power must be restored.

Douglas Todd: B.C. voices did speak up against Trudeau’s migration policies, but were ignored

Unclear how much of this commentary made it into ministerial briefing material (my assumption is that some of it did):

…At least a dozen noted people responsibly ignored the Canadian taboo against criticizing Ottawa’s immigration policy — and ran the risk of being labelled “xenophobic,” “racist” or “nativist” by the Liberals and their allies.

They included some of the labour economists McCallum consulted a decade ago, such as the University of B.C.’s David Green, Carleton University’s Christopher Worswick and Waterloo’s Mikal Skuterud.

In 2016 Green, Worswick and UBC’s Craig Riddell published an important article in Policy Options, which was highlighted by Postmedia. They were critical of then-immigration minister Ahmed Hussen, who was trumpeting his “ambitious plan” to drastically increase migration rates to build the economy. The economists cautioned that “immigration cannot be relied upon as a source of higher per capita incomes.”

Again, in 2019, Green expanded upon his remarks, saying the rapid rise in low-skilled workers entering Canada would likely lower the earnings of existing workers.

In 2017 Simon Fraser University political scientist Sanjay Jeram, along with former immigration department official Andrew Griffith, flagged that a national debate was needed on immigration economics. Jeram said Canadians’ individual financial well-being would shrink as corporations brought in low-skill immigrants to make up for alleged labour shortages.

“Earlier, in 2016, SFU economist Herb Grubel had cautioned high migration rates were not compatible with welfare societies, ultimately imposing a “fiscal burden” on taxpayers.

By 2021, the newly retired head of B.C.’s civil service, Don Wright, took advantage of his new-found freedom to write that Ottawa’s immigration policies were contributing greatly to the abandonment of the “broad middle-classes, by allowing real wages to stagnate.”

By last year, when Trudeau resigned after plummeting popularity, Canada’s GDP per capita, which measures economic growth per person, had dismally inched up only two per cent in a decade. In the same period, U.S. GDP per capita jumped 20 per cent.

International student alarms

As the Liberals were cranking up the number of foreign students, Kwantlen’s Polytechnic University’s Shinder Purewal told Postmedia in 2016 that Canada was marketing study visas around the world, creating a giant for-profit business, with hidden costs to taxpayers.”

“The University of Toronto’s Jane Knight, a specialist in higher education, was cited by Postmedia in 2013, saying Canada’s foreign-student programs were already losing their humanitarian ideals, becoming fixated on “self-interest” and “prestige-building.”

While politicians and post-secondary officials applauded how foreign students spent on retail goods and rent and created teaching jobs, most scholars harbouring critical thoughts felt it safer to stay quiet.

By 2019, however, B.C. immigration lawyer Sam Hyman and consultant Laleh Sahba were among those telling Postmedia how uneasy they were about a Statistics Canada report that up to one in three study-visa holders were not going to school. They described how many international students were being advised by dubious agents they could bypass school to work in Canada while pursuing the dream of permanent resident status…

Source: Douglas Todd: B.C. voices did speak up against Trudeau’s migration policies, but were ignored

Quebec perspectives

Lisée | Enfin, la pause démographique!

Not surprising that Lisée would take this position but it has been increasingly made in English Canada as well:

…Oui, mais la croissance ? Des économistes estiment que tout cela va réduire la croissance du produit intérieur brut total. Les organisations patronales affirment que tout cela est une catastrophe pour les entreprises, car l’augmentation de leur production est freinée par leur incapacité d’importer des salariés. En effet, mais cela les force à se tourner vers l’augmentation de leur productivité, l’automation et la robotisation. Ce faisant, la richesse totale n’augmente pas aussi vite, mais la richesse par habitant, oui. Pour résumer : si vous êtes un produit intérieur brut, c’est une mauvaise nouvelle. Si vous êtes une personne, c’est une bonne nouvelle.

L’incidence de l’intelligence artificielle. Nous entrons dans une phase totalement imprévisible de destruction de l’emploi par l’intelligence artificielle. Les experts débattent de la réalité, de la rapidité et de l’ampleur de ce bouleversement. Chez nous, l’Institut du Québec estime que 18 % des emplois québécois y sont vulnérables, taux qui grimpe à 24 % chez les jeunes. Il est donc impératif que nous ne soyons pas en surplus de population et de main-d’œuvre.

“Savoir s’adapter. Selon les scénarios démographiques, certaines régions vont décroître (Montréal, le Saguenay, le Bas-Saint-Laurent, la Gaspésie, l’Abitibi, la Côte-Nord) et toutes les autres vont croître. Plutôt que de tenter de renverser la tendance, l’État a intérêt à l’accompagner. Le télétravail et la régionalisation des tâches gouvernementales sont des outils permettant d’amortir le choc dans les régions à risque.

La pyramide des âges. Il y a davantage de vieux et moins d’enfants. On peut s’en désoler. Ou penser qu’il y aura enfin assez de places en CPE pour tout le monde, qu’on pourra réduire le nombre d’élèves par classe et mieux accompagner chacun de nos bambins.

La croissance, économique ou démographique, n’est pas un projet en soi, sauf pour les adeptes du gigantisme. Le projet est la qualité de la vie de chacun, l’épanouissement individuel et collectif, la poursuite du bonheur. On est neuf millions, on peut y arriver.”

Source: Chronique | Enfin, la pause démographique!

Nicolas: politiquement viable, et nous

Difference between raising issues and concerns and fanning the flames:

…Bernard Drainville et Paul St-Pierre Plamondon nous ont donné à la fin de la semaine un autre exemple d’un ton acerbe qui, il me semble, aurait été politiquement non viable il n’y a pas si longtemps. Au sujet de la décision de la Cour suprême du Canada sur l’accès des demandeurs d’asile aux CPE, le chef du PQ nous a assuré vendredi que les « milliards de personnes dans le monde qui auraient intérêt à immigrer au Québec pour améliorer leur qualité de vie ne peuvent avoir le même statut et le même droit à bénéficier des services publics que les citoyens québécois ».

Je ne peux pas croire qu’un homme comme lui ne sait pas qu’il attise les peurs en parlant de « milliards » de personnes, tout en étant dans l’erreur factuelle grossière. Je ne crois pas non plus que Bernard Drainville ignore que sa proposition de retirer aux demandeurs l’accès au filet social nous mènerait tout droit à la crise sociale, laquelle finit toujours par être plus coûteuse à l’État, en plus d’être catastrophique sur le plan humain.

Mais l’important, au bout du compte, c’est peut-être moins de répondre à chaque élément de ce type de discours que de ce type de discours que de se demander pourquoi et auprès de qui il résonne, et à quel coût. Le ton et le contenu de ces propositions politiques pourraient redevenir non viables. Ça dépend beaucoup de nous, et de la société que l’on se souhaite.

Source: Chronique | Le politiquement viable, et nous

Lisée | Accueillir toute la marmaille du monde

On the recent Supreme Court decision and that judges and their blurring of distinctions and rights between citizens and non-citizens:

…La Cour suprême du Canada ne partage pas cet avis. Dans sa récente décision qui ordonne au Québec d’ouvrir les portes de ses centres de la petite enfance aux bambins des demandeurs d’asile, même si leur demande n’est pas encore jugée valable, même s’ils n’ont pas de permis de travail, elle indique finalement que le Québec a le devoir d’offrir des places à toute la marmaille du monde. Le fait qu’il n’y a pas suffisamment de places pour tout le monde déjà présent sur le territoire — malgré le fait que la Coalition avenir Québec a, dans les huit dernières années, créé chaque année plus de places que tous les gouvernements précédents — ne lui fait pas un pli sur la toge.

Les juges ne sont pas de vulgaires comptables. Ils n’ont pas, par principe, à se préoccuper des conséquences budgétaires de leurs décisions. Ils vivent dans un monde parallèle, le monde juridique, où des droits existent ou n’existent pas. Aux élus de se débrouiller ensuite avec l’intendance.

On pouvait cependant penser que des distinctions existaient entre, d’une part, les citoyens canadiens et les résidents permanents, et, d’autre part, les personnes qui ne le sont pas. Cette distinction existe dans la plupart des démocraties avancées, y compris dans les pays scandinaves, où seuls les citoyens ont droit à la totalité du filet social. Mais le Canada, grâce à ses juges, est exceptionnel.

“La Charte des droits de Pierre Trudeau est entrée en vigueur en 1982. Il n’a fallu que trois ans, avec l’arrêt Singh en 1985, pour que la Cour enterre la distinction entre citoyens et non-citoyens. Voyez, a-t-elle écrit, à son article 7, la Charte indique que « chacun a droit à la vie, à la liberté et à la sécurité ». « Chacun » signifie toute personne présente sur le territoire.

En 1989, elle est allée plus loin en déclarant que les non-citoyens pouvaient être considérés comme un groupe discriminé en vertu de l’article 15 de la Charte, qui ne les mentionnait pas. Mais il y avait le mot « notamment » avec la liste des groupes, donc ils ont fait leur entrée.

Par conséquent, comme tout citoyen, un sans-papiers ou un demandeur d’asile peuvent se prévaloir de la totalité des droits d’appel si on leur refuse le statut de réfugié. Tant pis si ça prend huit ans. Tant pis si ça coûte des fortunes. Tant pis si ça rend humainement déchirant de retourner des gens chez eux après tout ce temps. Tant pis si, dans d’autres pays, ils font ça en quelques mois.

“Le remède ? Je vais vous faire sourire. Il faudrait changer la Constitution pour écrire « chaque citoyen » au lieu de « chacun » et enlever le mot « notamment ». Il y a un plan B : faire l’indépendance et insérer ces précisions dans la constitution du nouveau pays. Je vous laisse choisir la solution qui vous paraît la plus rapide.

La décision de vendredi, usant d’une logique intersectionnelle (femmes + asile), étend logiquement ce principe d’inclusion à l’ensemble des éléments du filet social. Je n’ai pas de doute que les juristes trudeauistes sont à l’œuvre pour contester, forts de ce nouveau précédent, toute différenciation restante entre les services offerts aux citoyens ou ceux offerts aux autres, touristes compris. J’exagère ? Voyez ce que disait Justin Trudeau sur son blogue en 2008 : « Si des extraterrestres venaient sur Terre et choisissaient le Canada comme société d’accueil, ils seraient protégés par la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés. »

Source: https://apple.news/AFGco-VIyTOOiFK17kprz3g

Refugees and Asylum Seekers

Iranians converting to Christianity ‘the easiest way’ to get asylum in Canada

As always, those desperate or motivated will find a way:

At a downtown Vancouver church, a Christian baptism takes place during a recent Sunday service. Amid the incense and infants dressed in white getting ready to receive the holy water is a group of four Iranian nationals also waiting to receive adult baptisms.

As with past baptisms, some of them will likely not return to the church after receiving their baptismal certificate. It is simply a means to an end — claiming asylum.

When a parishioner congratulates one of the newly baptized Farsi speakers, mentioning Iran’s significant Christian and Jewish populations, as well as Muslim, they reply in heavily accented English.

“I hate Muslims.”

While not quite the Christian message one might have expected, the conversion of Iranians to Christianity has been an increasingly popular trend over the past decade (one study suggests as many as 1.2 million Christian converts in Iran alone)…

Source: Iranians converting to Christianity ‘the easiest way’ to get asylum in Canada

Omidvar: Behind every refugee statistic is a personal and painful moment. Don’t lose sight of that

Good reminder that behind the statistics, there are people. But not all refugees are in the same situation that she and others were in, as recent increases indicate:

…That is why I find it troubling when refugee movements are reduced to numbers or political talking points. Governments understandably debate capacity, border management and the integrity of asylum systems. These are legitimate policy questions.

But behind every statistic is a deeply personal moment: the hurried packing of a bag, the quiet goodbye to a home that may never be seen again, the crossing of a border with little certainty about what comes next.

Most refugees did not imagine their lives unfolding this way. Most are not explicitly political actors or activists. They are teachers, engineers, shopkeepers, students – ordinary people like you or me. But in my life I’ve learned a crucial lesson that has stayed with me: No matter what, you cannot isolate yourself from the politics that are raging around you. Politics affects the way we all live. This is why I am today a “political” person.

Canada has been shaped by successive waves of people who arrived through moments of upheaval – from postwar Europe to Southeast Asia, from the Balkans to Syria. Many came with little more than resilience and hope. But over time, they became Canadians. They built businesses, strengthened institutions, raised families and contributed to the social and economic life of the country that welcomed them. I am one of those people.

Today, Canada is once again debating immigration and refugee policy with intensity. We are tightening numbers, making it more difficult for refugees to find safety in Canada. This is not just a signal of concern about our capacity and management, but also a real reflection of a growing political narrative that constrains our compassion. It threatens to make us lose sight of the human stories at the heart of these debates.

Granted, none of the contributions refugees eventually make are visible at the moment they cross a border. At that moment, refugees often look like uncertainty itself. They arrive tired, anxious and unsure about whether the world will make room for them.

But the refugee story does not end at the border. In many ways, it is where the next chapter begins. 

When I see images today of Iranians gathering at the Turkish border, I do not see strangers; I see families standing at the threshold of the same uncertain journey that my own familybegan almost five decades ago. And I am reminded that the line between an ordinary life and exile can appear faster than anyone expects – and that what happens next for them goes beyond those people, and into politics.

Source: Behind every refugee statistic is a personal and painful moment. Don’t lose sight of that

Other

Banerjee: Not all immigration paths are equal: Some immigrants thrive, while others struggle, in Canada’s two-step system

Good detailed comparative analysis:

…The tax data show that permit type, not Canadian experience alone, shapes the economic success of two-step immigrants. While high-performing groups — such as PGWP holders and ICTs — enjoy high, growing wages by benefiting from Canadian education or employer-driven entry, others — inc|luding WHMs and SPOU holders — face persistent economic disadvantage. Permit conditions, dependence on a partner for status and concentration in low-wage job sectors or geographically remote jobs likely compound vulnerability for the latter. The lack of transparency and coherence across temporary migration pathways makes these inequalities worse.

Policymakers should respond with co-ordinated actions in the short and medium term, drawing on the mandates of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) as the federal lead; Statistics Canada, and Employment and Social Development Canada for data and labour-market information; and provincial and territorial governments for post-secondary oversight and settlement programming. Settlement agencies, post-secondary institutions and employer partners are also critical delivery partners….

This analysis focused only on immigrants who successfully transitioned to permanent residency. This excludes many temporary residents who failed or are failing to secure permanent status — a major source of precarity within the IMP. Moreover, our data end in 2014. Since then, the IMP has grown dramatically, particularly through the PGWP stream, and the profile of international students has shifted toward college-level programs with weaker labour-market prospects (on entry of IMP permit holders to 2021 by stream, including the PGWP, see Vosko, 2025).

Recent federal policy changes compound these pressures. Since 2024, PR targets have been reduced and transition rules tightened. Many temporary residents now attempt to manage uncertainty by switching between permit types to extend their stay — a strategy that often disrupts employment and prolongs temporary status. Unless the federal government rebalances the relationship between temporary and permanent immigration, these trends will deepen structural inequities and erode the economic benefits.

Source: Not all immigration paths are equal: Some immigrants thrive, while others struggle, in Canada’s two-step system 

Jeziorek: Canada’s immigration system is going digital, and accountability must keep pace

Somewhat ironic as the OAG report on international students highlights the lack of accountability of current systems:

…Keeping automation accountable

Canada already has several oversight mechanisms in place, including algorithmic impact assessments required by directives on automated decision-making. 

These measures represent meaningful progress toward responsible digital governance. However, as immigration administration becomes increasingly automated and platform-based, additional safeguards are needed to ensure accountability keeps pace.

Possible measures include expanding public documentation about automated triage systems, introducing independent review processes and ensuring clear pathways for human review. Such steps would better align digital modernization with Canada’s existing oversight frameworks for automated decision-making.

Canada’s immigration system is often described as rights-basedand grounded in equity, fairness and inclusion. Maintaining public trust in that system depends on ensuring administrative decision systems remain transparent, contestable and accountable.

Automation and platform-based administration are reshaping Canada’s migration. Efficiency alone cannot sustain public trust. As Canada modernizes immigration administration, accountability must be built into digital systems as deliberately as the technologies themselves.

Source: Canada’s immigration system is going digital, and accountability must keep pace

Canada is letting rural employers hire more temporary foreign workers. Economists say it’s a misstep

Government does not appear to have learned from previous lobbying and changes:

Ottawa is introducing new measures to let rural employers hire more low-wage workers through the temporary foreign worker program, a move businesses say is needed to address ongoing labour shortages but economists and advocates warn is a step in the wrong direction.

Employers in “eligible rural regions” will be permitted to staff up to 15 per cent of their workforce with low-wage, temporary foreign workers, up from 10 per cent, the federal government announced Friday.  The new measures will be implemented as early as April 1, 2026, until March 31, 2027.

“Some rural communities continue to face acute labour shortages due to low unemployment rates, and ongoing difficulties attracting, recruiting, and retaining workers,” said a statement from Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), which oversees the temporary foreign worker (TFW) program….

The TFW program’s new rules are “a step in the wrong direction,” said Christopher Worswick, an economist at Carleton University in Ottawa, adding that the federal government is giving into pressure of employer groups when the focus should instead be on permanent immigration. In 2024, Ottawa started reining in immigration after years of rapid population growth largely driven by a surge of international students and temporary foreign workers who arrived during the pandemic. 

Leaning on low-wage TFWs reinforces a system where short-term labour fills permanent needs, leaving deeper challenges in attracting and retaining workers unaddressed, Worswick said. Migrant workers whose status is tied to a single employer often fear speaking out about low wages and poor conditions, creating a power imbalance that benefits employers seeking a compliant workforce.

Without the program, businesses struggling to hire would have to raise workers’ wages and improve working conditions to attract applicants, or invest in new technology to save money, he added.

“When there’s a shortage of a good, demand is greater than supply so you should see upward pressure on price until demand equals supply,” he said. “The labour market is basically the same thing.”

In other words, “if you can’t hire somebody, then what economics would say is you should re-advertise at a higher wage.”

But industry groups maintain that restricting access to TFWs could force businesses to scale back or shut down entirely, particularly in rural and remote areas where hiring challenges are most acute. They say the new rules will give employers more flexibility to fill persistent labour gaps and keep operations running when local workers are not available….

Source: Canada is letting rural employers hire more temporary foreign workers. Economists say it’s a misstep

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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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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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ICYMI: Tying immigration to homes a ‘good’ idea but not a fix-all: Housing minister – Global News

2024/01/18 Leave a comment

Apart from the irony of the former immigration minister waking up to the fact that his policies contributed to housing availability/affordability problems, it is valid to say it is not a “fix-all.” But it is an essential part of the mix, particularly in the short-to-medium term:

Fraser says temporary immigration programs are putting pressure on the housing system and creating a “serious issue we need to address.”

He pointed to the temporary foreign worker and international student programs. The federal government has said they are considering a cap on international student, but want to take a year to work with provinces first to try to find solutions.

“Enough is enough,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said in announcing changes to the international student program last year. “If provinces and territories cannot do this, we will do it for them and they will not like the bluntness of the instruments that we use.”

Miller previously described the idea of a cap on international students as akin to “surgery with a hammer” during an interview with Global News

Fraser said the program has grown “by hundreds of thousands of people each year” in the last couple of years.

“There are some institutions in parts of this country, I have the sincerely held belief, have come to exist just to exploit the program for the personal financial gains of the people behind some of these schools, if we can call them that,” he said.

Source: Tying immigration to homes a ‘good’ idea but not a fix-all: Housing minister – Global News

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The Liberals win points on housing policy, but it might not change the politics

2023/10/20 Leave a comment

As I have also argued, “The new Liberal measures to increase building and alleviate the shortage, meanwhile, aren’t likely to have a palpable impact on the supply of housing for years – and not before the scheduled 2025 election.”

Paying a price for their fixation on higher levels of immigration while ignoring the impacts on housing, healthcare and infrastructure:

Don’t look now, but the Liberals are starting to win some policy debates on the housing crisis. It just might be too late for the politics.

Justin Trudeau’s Liberals spent much of 2023 getting hammered about the high price of houses, skyrocketing rents and mortgage spikes. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre was making hay, and gaining ground, lambasting Mr. Trudeau by channelling the resentment about 30-year-olds living in their parents’ homes and families struggling to afford one.

For most of the year, the Liberals hemmed and hawed and declared that all the things they had already done were the greatest ever – as if they couldn’t see the problem nearly everyone was feeling.

But if you tuned into Question Period on Monday, there was Housing Minister Sean Fraser knocking back Conservative attacks with shots of his own, claiming, albeit apocryphally, that the Tories plan to raise taxes on rental units.

Liberals could, and did, claim that private-sector actors have endorsed some of their new housing measures. Four major developers said they plan to build more than 10,000 rental units between them because of the federal government’s September move to remove the GST on purpose-built rental housing. Mortgage lenders have said the tripling of the Canada Mortgage Bond Program will make a significant difference for builders.

Where the Tories were landing blows at will a few months ago, now Mr. Fraser was jousting gamely, responding to a Peterborough Conservative MP’s arguments that Liberal “inflationary spending” forced interest rates higher by pointing to a multimillion-dollar housing announcement in her riding. Though the Tories kept picking the fight, the Liberals were starting to win some of the rounds.

But if the Liberals are starting to get a grip on the issue in Question Period, it comes at a time when no one is watching. Not many people watch Commons debates, and this week, the public attention paid to Parliament was devoted almost entirely to speeches about events in the Middle East.

It’s not clear, anyway, if the Liberals can still rebuild credibility after letting the housing debate get away from them.

Their late-summer epiphany came when the public outcry was rising high and Liberal poll numbers were falling low. Their biggest new measure – that GST break – was something the Liberals promised to do in 2015 but didn’t.

Even so, the Liberals suddenly boosted housing policy on a bigger scale, with real potential. The deals Mr. Fraser is signing with cities and towns for money from Ottawa’s Housing Accelerator Fund could move the dials, too, if municipalities make rule changes that, for example, allow more triplexes to be built.

Mr. Fraser now likes to point out that the Liberal bill provides more extensive housing tax breaks than a bill Mr. Poilievre tabled in September – hence the minister’s disingenuous claim that the Conservatives would raise taxes on housing.

The Liberals now have better policy that will make a difference. But it might not change the politics for Mr. Trudeau’s government.

For starters, Mr. Poilievre’s Conservatives have had some success in making people believe that government deficit spending – and big Liberal spending, during the pandemic’s peak and now – is the cause of inflation, and therefore the cause of high interest rates.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland can argue that inflation is global and declining, and Canada’s deficits and debt are lower than most industrialized countries. And while the Liberals have been profligate spenders who showed little regard for controlling costs, there’s no reason to believe a Conservative government would take office and bring in spending cuts that would make interest rates rapidly tumble.

But those are arguments. People feel inflation. And they keep feeling it even when the pace of price increases starts to slow. Many felt the struggle of paying a high cost of housing exacerbated by a shortage of supply, and now are feeling the pinch of higher interest rates through mortgage bills or higher rents. The Bank of Canada’s rate increases seemed to park declines in Liberal poll numbers.

The new Liberal measures to increase building and alleviate the shortage, meanwhile, aren’t likely to have a palpable impact on the supply of housing for years – and not before the scheduled 2025 election.

So now the Liberals have regained their footing in the fight over who can address the housing crisis but it is still a government eight years into power hoping to win a political argument over who has the best solutions for years in the future. Mr. Fraser is starting to win debates in the Commons on housing policy, but it might be too late to make Canadians feel things will change.

Source: The Liberals win points on housing policy, but it might not change the politics

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Canadian government won’t rule out changing immigration targets to address housing challenges, Fraser says

2023/09/12 Leave a comment

Odd that former minister of immigration is signalling possible changes rather than the current immigration minister. Whether deliberate strategy for the minister who was responsible for increases to take some of the possible heat over high immigration levels, or simply that he now understands (better late than never) the linkages between immigration levels and housing pressures.

Will only know whether this is just a series of trial balloons or a significant pivot with the release of the immigration levels plan later this fall:

Canada’s housing minister says the federal government isn’t ruling out changes to its ambitious immigration targets, but maintains the country should also focus on what it can do to increase housing supply when it comes to addressing current housing challenges.

“When we look to the future of immigration levels planning, we want to maintain ambition and immigration, but we want to better align our immigration policies with the absorptive capacity of communities that includes housing, that includes health care, that includes infrastructure,” Sean Fraser said in an interview on CTV’s Question Period with Vassy Kapelos on Sunday.

Fraser said he believes the federal government has “some work to do” with its temporary immigration programs, which currently operate on the basis of demand in an “uncapped way,” but doesn’t “necessarily” need to reduce the number of newcomers who become permanent residents each year. It’s common for almost half of those individuals to already be in Canada as temporary residents, he noted.

Before making any changes, however, Fraser said the federal government would have to consult with other levels of government — since deciding which institutions take in international students is within the purview of provincial governments — as well as institutions that have “a duty to play part of a role in housing the people who come here.”

He also stressed that conversations around addressing the country’s housing crisis should not solely revolve around immigration.

“It’s important that when we’re looking at the answer to our housing challenges, we also focus on what we can do to increase the supply,” the minister said.

“I think it’s essential that we remember that immigration remains one of Canada’s strongest competitive advantages in the global economy.”

Fraser introduced Canada’s ambitious immigration targets in November 2022 when he was the federal immigration minister, with a goal of bringing in 465,000 permanent residents in 2023, 485,000 in 2024 and 500,000 in 2025.

At the time, he said the move was necessary to ensure Canada’s economic prosperity, by helping businesses find workers to fill in labour gaps and to attract the skills required in key sectors including health care, skilled trades, manufacturing and technology.

Academics, commercial banks, opposition politicians and policy thinkers, however, have been warning the federal government the country’s high-growth immigration strategy is exacerbating Canada’s housing crisis.

In a July report, economists from TD estimated that if the current immigration strategy continues, Canada’s housing shortfall could widen by about half a million units in just two years’ time.

The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation has estimated the country needs to build 3.5 million more homes by 2030 than it is currently on track for, to help achieve some semblance of housing affordability.

Fraser previously said putting a cap on the number of international students permitted to study in this country is one of the solutions the federal government is discussing when it comes to addressing housing affordability and rental availability.

But when speaking with Kapelos on Sunday, he said his preference is to continue to welcome “significant numbers” of international students “because the program is good for Canada, both in the short term and the long term when you create a pipeline of potential new citizens.”

Fraser said the federal government, along with its provincial and institutional partners, have to ensure that international students — many of whom have reported struggles to find affordable and adequate housing in Canada — are supported and communities have the capacity to “absorb them” when they arrive here.

“If we were going to shift the way that we operate, to set a target or to align the numbers with the housing capacity, it’s a monumental change in the way that Canada does immigration,” Fraser said.

“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. But it does mean if we’re seeking to make a permanent change to the way that Canada’s immigration laws operate, we have to do it right.”

Welcoming people to Canada who are making a productive contribution to the country’s economy is “essential,” Fraser said, adding he doesn’t “want to lose that.”

Source: Canadian government won’t rule out changing immigration targets to … – CTV News

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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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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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Watt: The Liberals tied immigration to housing: they need to prove it can work

2023/08/21 Leave a comment

But given the time lags involved in building new houses, even assuming the federal government provides funding, most municipal zoning restrictions are relaxed and service fees reduced where appropriate, any concrete results in terms of “shovels in the ground” will take a few years.

In other words, after the election. The federal and provincial (save Quebec) government fixation on increasing immigration, temporary and permanent, while largely ignoring the impact on housing, healthcare and infrastructure, will deservedly come back to haunt the Liberal government if no change occurs to planned permanent immigration levels and unrestricted temporary migration (students and workers):

The revamped Liberal cabinet retreats to Prince Edward Island this week while their party languishes in polling and the Conservatives surge. Underestimate Trudeau at your peril, perhaps, but something seems to have become particularly challenging.

While it is difficult to put your finger on just what that something is, it has become clear that much of that something is Canada’s housing crisis.

Apart from the PM himself, perhaps no one feels the heat on the way to Charlottetown more than Sean Fraser, the new housing minister. Fraser got this job because the Liberals have embarked on a strategy to tie immigration (Fraser previously led this portfolio) inexorably to housing, supposedly using newly arrived skilled labour to build the houses we desperately need.

All well and good, but it doesn’t seem Canadians are having any of it. The problem is, most Canadians aren’t convinced this works — and with house prices swelling, interest rates rising, and immigration continuing exponentially, I fear by combining these issues so closely the Liberals risk sparking a major backlash against their record-setting immigration plans.

Fraser has outlined his answer to the conundrum: add more supply through incentives to local governments and increase immigration rates to, in part, provide the labour required for this.

The new housing minister tackles this after the prime minister bluntly argued, “housing isn’t a primary federal responsibility.” On cleanup duty, Fraser later stated the federal government should be more active in developing and enacting housing policy, as it once was.

This, of course, is the right approach. Nevertheless, Fraser’s major challenge will be convincing Canadians that high immigration levels are good when many can’t afford homes.

This week, videos of Canadians tearily lamenting the cost of living went viral. The narrative that, after eight years in office, this government has left many — the very ones they promised to fight for — behind is beginning to set like cement.

Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has taken the government to task on housing with brutal effectiveness. He has managed to own this rhetorical stance while still supporting immigration — making the disconnect between the Liberal’s immigration policy and inaction on housing even harder to ignore.

Under Fraser’s oversight, immigration increased exponentially but integration remained plagued with accreditation issues and failed to correspond with housing supply: the national housing strategy has only resulted in just over 100,000 homes. The Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation determined 5.8 million more are needed over the next decade. In 2022, our population grew by over a million.

The Bank of Canada also acknowledged recently that immigration drives up housing demand. As the problem becomes more acute, this is where people will focus — not on the “mirage of economic prosperity” immigration otherwise contributes to.

The Liberals, if they are to have any hope of winning the next election, must convince Canadians immigration is in their near-term interests and that it will result in more houses being built. That’s a tall order when voters are being priced out of even the remotest dream of owning a home. It’s a disconnect that also dissuades immigrants from wanting to come here in the first place.

By failing to acknowledge this and rectify the integration issues in our immigration system so newcomers can positively contribute to the housing supply, the Liberals risk allowing the social cohesion they so value to fray. And when that starts, the uniquely Canadian support for significant levels of immigration will fray with it.

That would be a terrible shame. No one needs a lecture on the fundamental role immigration has played in our past and the crucial role it will play in our future — much less that it is simply right.

What isn’t right is an approach to this issue driven by complacency and inaction rather than by a fundamental commitment — not just to policy statements but to actually building new homes.

Source: The Liberals tied immigration to housing: they need to prove it can work

Filed under Immigration Tagged with , , , , ,

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