Reforms on international students were long past due

After weeks of foreshadowing, the federal government moved this week to cap the number of international student visas over the next two years. File this policy change in the “better late than never” category.

The number of international students flowing to this country has grown by such epic proportions it is difficult to reach any conclusion other than the federal Liberals were simply sleeping on this file. There have been no shortage of red flags, from Statistics Canada reports warning of the strain on affordable housing and access to social services to provincial auditors warning of an unhealthy dependence on international student fees by postsecondary institutions which are being underfunded.

Over the past two years, the number of international students in this country jumped from 617,000 to more than a million. About a third are in public universities but the overwhelming majority are in public colleges or private schools, often offering substandard education and a backdoor route to permanent status in this country. Immigration Minister Marc Miller, in announcing he is cutting the number of study permits by 35 per cent to 364,000 this year, is right to target the shady operators who are preying on international students and not doctoral and postgraduate international students at public universities. Miller says hundreds of the private schools should be shut down.

“It is not the intention of this program to have sham commerce degrees and business degrees that are sitting on top of a massage parlour,” Miller said in making his announcement.

There are a number of threads to unravel from this announcement. First and foremost, as the minister stressed, this is not an indictment of foreign students. They are hardly responsible for a housing crunch or fears over access to stretched social services. International students were more likely the victims, living in crowded, substandard housing, dealing with a much more expensive country that they had anticipated and receiving diplomas which Miller says were being churned out like “puppy mills.” It was creating reputational damage to this country.

But these students would not be in this country without federal approval, so Miller is correcting a problem that his government largely created. According to a memo obtained by The Canadian Press, the Trudeau government was warned in 2022 that there was a widening gap between immigration and housing supply, largely driven by the increasing number of international students and temporary foreign workers admitted to this country.

This cap will be most acutely felt in Ontario, home to 51 per cent of international students. The Doug Ford government has twice been warned about a reliance on international student tuition fees, once in November by his own panel on colleges and universities, and in 2021 by the auditor-general who warned him not to increase a dependency on foreign student fees without a postsecondary education plan in place. The panel reported in November that the Progressive Conservatives had the lowest per student post-secondary funding in the country following a tuition cut and freeze that meant colleges and universities had reached the point at which revenue from international student tuition fees was “fundamental to the sector’s financial sustainability.” Now Ford is forced into some tough decisions. He will have to decide what schools can bring in international students and what schools should be eliminated, while protecting universities in financial trouble.

Finally, the Liberals — and all governments at all levels — must handle matters of immigration, including temporary foreign workers and international students, with utmost delicacy. To their credit, Canadians have held together on a consensus on the accommodation of immigrants. And to their credit, Canadian politicians have largely resisted any base urge to exploit frustration and anxiety in this country by playing the immigration card.

But the numbers are increasing. Some 500,000 immigrants will arrive next year and this country is going through a population boom during challenging economic times. Immigration will dominate much of the upcoming U.S. presidential election and delicacy is not a feature of debate to the south, particularly from Republicans.

It would not take much to bust that Canadian consensus. We trust our politicians to be vigilant on that score.