‘Culling’ bad actors capitalizing on tuition fees more effective than capping student visas in bid to fix housing crisis: immigration lawyer

Good long read. Insights from Nanos particularly of interest as well as suggestions by immigration lawyer Betsy Kane, albeit hard to implement given the various interests involved:

As politicians trade shots over who is to blame for Canada’s housing crisis, immigration lawyer Betsy Kane says “the finger-pointing” should be aimed at the schools actively recruiting “anyone and everyone who has the money to get here” without ensuring an adequate supply of student housing. Rather than capping the number of student visas, she says the government should instead tighten the criteria under which institutions are permitted to host them.  

However, NDP housing and immigration critic Jenny Kwan (Vancouver East, B.C.) says a cap would simply be more of the Liberals “tinkering around the edges” of the housing crisis, and “if they want to point fingers, they should look at themselves in the mirror,” and admit that their current housing strategy is, at best, inefficient, and, at worst, a failure.

On Aug. 21, during the Liberals’ cabinet retreat in Prince Edward Island, Housing Minister Sean Fraser (Central Nova, N.S.) suggested the federal government may need to consider a cap on its international student program, which has seen “explosive growth” since the Liberals took office in 2015. 

Currently, there are more than 807,000 international students with study permits in Canada, up from 352,330 in 2015.

“There are good private institutions out there, and separating the wheat from the chaff is going to be a big focus of the work that I try to do with [Immigration Minister Marc] Miller,” Fraser said, adding that “when you see some of these institutions that have five, six times as many students enrolled as they have spaces for them in the building … you’ve got to start to ask yourself some pretty tough questions.”

In an interview with CBC’s The House later that week, Immigration Minister Marc Miller (Ville-Marie–Le Sud-Ouest–Île-des-Soeurs, Que.) said Canada is on track to host around 900,000 international students this year, and while he did not commit to Fraser’s suggestion, he said a cap was not “the only solution to this.” 

Miller also cast blame on a number of “illegitimate actors” exploiting the system, and while he declined to “name and shame,” he said many of those actors were within the private market.

While Fraser cautioned against blaming newcomers for “housing challenges that have been several decades in the making,” Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, Ont.) accused the Liberals of doing just that.

“[Prime Minister Justin Trudeau] thinks if you’re afraid of your neighbours, you might forget that you can’t pay your rent. This is what demagogues do,” Poilievre said at an Aug. 23 press conference on Parliament Hill. “He wants Canadians to forget all that and blame immigrants. He wants to divide people to distract from his failings.”

Kane, vice-president of government relations with the Canadian Immigration Lawyer Association, told The Hill Times it was “a bit unfair” to blame the high number of international students for putting pressure on the housing market.

“What we’re seeing is the result of colleges and universities leveraging the International Student Program in order to capitalize on the tuition that they’re able to charge,” Kane said. “As Minister Fraser said, we need to cut ‘the wheat from the chaff’ and figure out which institutions aren’t attempting to deliver high-quality education but rather to capitalize on the higher tuition fees.”

Kane said the government could reduce the number of students in other ways, including narrowing the eligibility or designating so-called “trusted educational institutions” that can demonstrate they are delivering programming that can translate to valuable labour market skills and job opportunities.

“By culling the number of institutions and increasing the financial wherewithal students must demonstrate to qualify, you’re in essence capping the number without capping all international students,” Kane explained, adding that the government could also look to tighten further the criteria for which programs of study are eligible to receive applications by international students.

“We don’t necessarily need more international graduates with a one- or two-year business administration diploma,” Kane said. “But we do need graduates in the trades and transportation.”

Additionally, Kane said those institutions should have a greater responsibility to ensure that there is sufficient housing to accommodate students, pointing to similar responsibilities imposed on employers looking to bring in temporary foreign workers. 

Kane also noted that a cap on international students and the Liberals’ targets for new permanent residents were “two different sides of the [immigration] coin.”

“There’s always a risk of a backlash to any type of newcomer … but many of the cohort of individuals being selected as permanent residents are already here as workers and students who can demonstrate that their education, language skills, and work experience will translate into helping our economy,” Kane explained. “So what the government is saying is that in favour of letting us achieve our overall permanent immigration goals, we may have to limit the intake of our temporary residents.”

‘Collision’ between increased immigration and housing market stress ‘a major risk’ for Liberals, says pollster Nanos

While a plurality of Canadians have historically supported greater immigration, Nik Nanos, CEO and chief data scientist for Nanos Research, said that a recent survey conducted by Nanos between July 30 and Aug. 3 for Bloomberg News suggests a majority of Canadians believe increasing the annual immigration targets from 465,000 in 2023 to 500,000 by 2025 would have a negative (42 per cent) or somewhat negative (26 per cent) impact on housing prices. Only one in five believe it will have a positive (eight per cent) or somewhat positive impact (12 per cent).

“Canadians are not against immigration, but they do understand that when you bring over [400,000] to 500,000 new people into the country every year, they have to live someplace,” Nanos told The Hill Times, comparing the immigration targets to adding the population of cities like Kitchener, Ont., every year.

“These are pretty significant numbers,” Nanos continued, adding that the average Canadian doesn’t need to be an expert on immigration or housing to know that those newcomers are going to put more pressure on the market.

According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Canada needs to build 5.8 million new homes by 2030 to tackle housing affordability. The current pace of building puts the country on track to construct just 2.3 million homes by then.

“I think the collision of increasing the number of immigrants and the stress on housing is a major risk for the Liberals,” Nanos said, adding that the Liberals are primarily responsible for putting the two issues on their current path.

“The Liberals created this policy, so they have to take responsibility for the repercussions in terms of pressure on housing and other social welfare programs,” Nanos continued. “They need to work with the provinces and municipalities in order for this policy of bringing in more newcomers to work well and to have the least amount of disruption.”

‘Pointing fingers’ at newcomers, students no substitute for effective housing strategy, says NDP MP Kwan

Kwan called the apparent “change in tune” from Fraser since being sworn in “disconcerting.” While speaking to reporters outside Rideau Hall on July 26, Fraser “[urged] caution to anyone who believes the answer to our housing challenges is to close the door on newcomers.” Kwan said that trying to divert blame to any one group in need of housing is not the solution. 

“The problem is not new people; the problem is the government and a lack of programs and measures that need to be in place to provide housing to both Canadians and newcomers alike,” Kwan said. “Unless [the Liberals] face the music and admit what they are doing is deficient, and in some cases a complete failure, we’re going to keep having this problem.”

However, it is not just the current Liberal government that Kwan says bears responsibility for the current housing crisis, pointing to the actions of consecutive governments of both stripes in the early 1990s—first the Progressive Conservative government under Brian Mulroney and then Jean Chrétien’s Liberals—who began reducing spending on housing, and cut the federal co-operative housing program before eventually pulling the plug on building any new affordable housing units entirely.

Rather than capping the number of international students admitted into the country every year, Kwan said the government should require universities and colleges to provide affordable student housing.

“We know that international students pay exorbitant fees to apply and then pay a significant amount more in tuition fees,” Kwan said, noting the schools had come to rely on that source of income due to a lack of sufficient funding from the provinces.

Kwan said the federal government should play an equal partner with the provinces and schools in funding those student accommodations, and also suggested the Liberals could tie the number of permits an institution could receive to the number of homes they can actually provide.

However, Kwan said that would simply be more “tinkering around the edges” of the problem.

“What we need is the government to deliver on a real housing plan, and that means taking bold action to make real investments,” Kwan said, noting that the federal auditor general’s November 2022 report on the National Housing Strategy provided “riches of embarrassment.” 

She also pointed to testimony from CMHC president Romy Bowers at a Dec. 5, 2022, House Human Resources, Skills, and Social Development Committee meeting, where Bowers said the CMHC’s goal of all Canadians having a “home they can afford and [that] meets their needs” by 2030 is “aspirational.”

“It’s like our moonshot. It’s like our North Star that guides our activity. It’s likely that we’re not going to achieve it, but we feel that there’s a lot of value in trying for it,” Bowers told the committee.

Kwan said if that was Canada’s approach to homelessness and the housing crisis, “it isn’t a wonder that we’re failing.”

“[The NDP] is calling on the government to build more social housing, co-op housing, and community housing that once upon a time was built by the federal government, and we need to get back to doing that,” Kwan said, noting that building was only half of the solution. 

The second half would require increased efforts to safeguard the dwindling stock that Canada has left.

“Canada is losing low-cost rental housing stock to financialized landlords, buying up low-cost rental apartments only to subsequently reno- or demo-evict the current tenants,” Kwan explained, pointing to a recent study by Steve Pomeroy, a housing research consultant and senior research fellow in the Centre for Urban Research and Education at Carleton University. 

Pomeroy’s study found that while the National Housing Strategy included plans to build 16,000 new affordable units per year, four existing units were lost for every unit built. 

“We can’t build fast enough if that rate of loss is allowed to continue,” Kwan said. “We have to stop the bleeding.” 

The NDP is calling on the federal government to create an acquisition fund for non-profits to hold existing stock in a land trust in perpetuity, as well as a moratorium on acquiring those units by “financialized landlords.” Kwan said that Canada could follow the lead of nations like New Zealand that have introduced mortgage “escalators” that increase the required down payment on second and third homes, which would also have the added benefit of levelling the playing field for first-time home buyers.

“To fix the housing crisis, the right to housing needs to be principal, and the government needs to ensure they have a plan commensurate with that to deliver,” Kwan continued. “Minister Fraser said everything is on the table, and there’s no rock he won’t turn … how about tackling the hard stuff and not tinkering around the edges?”

Source: ‘Culling’ bad actors capitalizing on tuition fees more effective than capping student visas in bid to fix housing crisis: immigration lawyer