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In an effort to deal with the politically explosive housing and affordability crises that experts say are exacerbated by the more than 800,000 international students in the country, Marc Miller, minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, announced a 35% cut in the number of student visas Canada will issue, starting immediately.
The cut, which is scheduled to last two years, will result in a decrease of 364,000 international students coming to Canada this year and next.
The minister also announced visa applicants will now be required to provide a “provincial attestation” that the institution they intend to study at is not one of what the minister referred to as the “bad actors”, or what a few weeks ago he called the “diploma equivalent of puppy mills”. (Licensing of education institutions in Canada is a provincial responsibility.)
As Miller made clear, ‘bad actors’ also include individuals who enter Canada on student visas but do not enrol in college or university. According to a Statistics Canada report published last November, as many as one quarter of those who entered Canada on study permits in 2019 did not enrol in post-secondary institutions.
“It is not the intention of this program [Canada’s student visa program],” the minister insisted, “to have sham commerce degrees or business degrees [given by ‘colleges’] that are sitting on top of a massage parlour that someone doesn’t even go to then come into the province and drive an Uber [taxi].”
Showing some exasperation, he then added: “If you need a dedicated channel for Uber drivers in Canada, I can design that. But that isn’t the intention of the international student program.”
Focus on quality
Despite Miller’s harsh words for ‘bad actors’, he was at pains to emphasise that changes “are not against individual international students”.
Rather, “they are to ensure that as future students arrive in Canada, they receive the quality of education that they signed up for and the hope they were provided [by Canadian institutions] in their home countries”.
The minister also referenced several issues that have become political hot potatoes in the past year.
The first is the housing availability and affordability crisis. Over the past five years prices for new homes have risen by 40% and in the past year by 6.3%. Nationwide, rents for two-bedroom apartments have risen by an average of 9.6% annually.
In large part these increases are the result of years during which developers did not build enough houses and by the largest wave of immigration in more than a century that has pushed the country’s population to 40 million; in 2022 Canada welcomed one million immigrants.
In college and university towns across the country, international students contribute to the housing shortage – especially when, as is often the case, the colleges do not provide housing for international students.
The population of the southwestern Ontario city of London, which is the home of both Fanshawe College and the University of Western Ontario, is just over 400,000. In 2022 Fanshawe enrolled 26% more international students than it did the year before, making its total number of international students 6,500. The University of Western Ontario enrolled 4,759 international students. So together, the schools brought 11,259 international students into London.
Professor Mike Moffat, who teaches business, economics and public policy at the Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario, said: “We’re seeing a lot of single-family homes getting converted into student rentals. Previously, as in most communities with colleges and universities, there were kinds of informal boundaries between where the students live and the townies.”
The student area has been expanding out from many colleges by a block or two every year. So, the catchment area where students live is growing, particularly along bus lines, he explained. “The effect cascades through the entire housing system. What’s happening on the student side is causing shortages on family-sized homes because of those conversions into student rentals.
Provincial underfunding of HE
“International students are the biggest victims of our inability to plan. They are not the ones causing the problem. They are among the ones having to suffer because of the problem. They are the ones who have to double and sometimes triple up,” he told University World News in an interview last year.
The second area Miller referenced was the underfunding by the provinces of their public colleges and universities.
As the financial reports 2022-23 of McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) show, revenue from tuition fees rose by CA$8.4 million (US$6.2 million) or 1.9% to CA$445.8 million, “solely due to increased international enrolment and international tuition rate increases”. Tuition fees in Ontario have been essentially frozen for the past six years – even as grants to colleges and universities have been reduced.
Other provinces also see international students as being akin to ATMs.
At the University of Calgary in Alberta undergraduate tuition for this academic year for Canadians is CA$6,961, while for international students it is CA$26,849. At Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, tuition for Canadians is CA$8,983, while it is almost CA$10,000 higher for international students.
In the 2020 to 2021 academic year international students accounted for 68% of total tuition fees collected by Ontario’s colleges. At CA$1.7 billion (US$1.3 billion), it means international students contributed more to Ontario’s college system than did the government of Ontario, Canada’s richest province.
As Miller, a federal cabinet minister with no authority to set tuition, said: “I’m not the minister of postsecondary education underfunding … It’s a system that has some real integrity issues.
“It’s unacceptable that some private institutions have taken advantage of international students by operating under-resourced campuses, lacking support for students and charging high tuition fees, all while significantly increasing their intake of international students.”
Underscoring the fact that Canada still welcomes international students, Miller said: “It is a disservice to welcome international students in Canada knowing not all are getting the resources they need to succeed in Canada and having them return home disillusioned and disappointed in Canada’s education system.”
The case of India
Under the new scheme, visa numbers will be allocated to provinces according to their population, meaning Ontario, with a population of 15.8 million, will have the most visas. Smaller provinces, like Saskatchewan, which has 1.2 million people, and Newfoundland, which has 540,000, will see significant reductions.
The minister did not indicate that the government has a quota in mind for how many visas to allot to different countries. However, it is likely that India, the country that has sent the largest number of students to Canada for years, will receive fewer visas.
Last week, Miller announced that the number of international students from India in the last quarter of 2023 had dropped – by 86%, from 108,904 to 14,910.
Over the previous three quarters, according to ApplyBoard, visa applications from India had also fallen by 41%, meaning Canadian officials “processed 60,000 fewer applications” from July to October 2023 than the previous year.
ApplyBoard, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, cites two main reasons for this decline.
The first, as measured by social media postings, is concern about housing. ApplyBoard’s research found that between April and August 2023 “the number of articles written about housing in Canada increased five-fold versus the same period” the year before.
These findings accorded with those of Better Dwelling, Canada’s largest independent housing news outlet. According to Stephen Punwasi, Better Dwelling’s co-founder: “More and more international students have been posting on social media about the hardships they face in Canada, specifically calling out the high cost of living [rent being the greatest expense] and lack of opportunity promised.”
Political tensions
The second reason cited by ApplyBoard for the drop in applicants from India is the deep freeze Indo-Canadian relations has been in since mid-September when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced in the House of Commons that there were “credible” allegations that the government of Narendra Modi was behind the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh activist, in Surrey, British Columbia, a Vancouver suburb.
Modi angrily denied the allegations, which Trudeau called “an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty”.
At the G-20 summit in New Delhi in September, Canada “declared its deep concerns to the top intelligence and security officials of the Indian government. Last week at the G20 I brought them personally and directly to Prime Minister Modi in no uncertain terms”, Trudeau said. For his part, Modi expressed India’s concern about Canada harbouring Sikh separatists.
In October, after a tit-for-tat expulsion of a senior Indian diplomat by Canada and a Canadian diplomat by India, fearing that its diplomats would be stripped of their international immunity, Canada removed 41 of its 62 diplomats from India.
The withdrawal of these diplomats from Chandigarh, Mumbai and Bangalore, reduced Canada’s ability to process visas – at the same time as applications were dropping while the diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing was covered in Indian media.
Work permits
The regulations announced by Miller also limit international students’ access to work permits. Spouses of international students in masters and doctoral programs, as well as in medicine and law, will be eligible for work permits.
“Spouses of international students enrolled at other levels of study, including undergraduate college programs, will no longer be eligible” for work permits he said.
This cap will not apply to applicants already in Canada who seek to extend their studies, for example, move from an undergraduate programme to a graduate programme. Miller explained: “[As] it wouldn’t be fair to prevent someone from finishing the program. Nor will the cap have an effect on study permit holders currently in Canada.”
Miller’s trademark blunt language was on display when, albeit mixing his metaphors, he answered a reporter’s question about why he thinks things will be better after the two-year restriction on student visa numbers ends: “We’ve got two years to actually get the ship in order. It’s a bit of a mess and it’s time to rein it in.”
The cut, which is scheduled to last two years, will result in a decrease of 364,000 international students coming to Canada this year and next.
The minister also announced visa applicants will now be required to provide a “provincial attestation” that the institution they intend to study at is not one of what the minister referred to as the “bad actors”, or what a few weeks ago he called the “diploma equivalent of puppy mills”. (Licensing of education institutions in Canada is a provincial responsibility.)
As Miller made clear, ‘bad actors’ also include individuals who enter Canada on student visas but do not enrol in college or university. According to a Statistics Canada report published last November, as many as one quarter of those who entered Canada on study permits in 2019 did not enrol in post-secondary institutions.
“It is not the intention of this program [Canada’s student visa program],” the minister insisted, “to have sham commerce degrees or business degrees [given by ‘colleges’] that are sitting on top of a massage parlour that someone doesn’t even go to then come into the province and drive an Uber [taxi].”
Showing some exasperation, he then added: “If you need a dedicated channel for Uber drivers in Canada, I can design that. But that isn’t the intention of the international student program.”
Focus on quality
Despite Miller’s harsh words for ‘bad actors’, he was at pains to emphasise that changes “are not against individual international students”.
Rather, “they are to ensure that as future students arrive in Canada, they receive the quality of education that they signed up for and the hope they were provided [by Canadian institutions] in their home countries”.
The minister also referenced several issues that have become political hot potatoes in the past year.
The first is the housing availability and affordability crisis. Over the past five years prices for new homes have risen by 40% and in the past year by 6.3%. Nationwide, rents for two-bedroom apartments have risen by an average of 9.6% annually.
In large part these increases are the result of years during which developers did not build enough houses and by the largest wave of immigration in more than a century that has pushed the country’s population to 40 million; in 2022 Canada welcomed one million immigrants.
In college and university towns across the country, international students contribute to the housing shortage – especially when, as is often the case, the colleges do not provide housing for international students.
The population of the southwestern Ontario city of London, which is the home of both Fanshawe College and the University of Western Ontario, is just over 400,000. In 2022 Fanshawe enrolled 26% more international students than it did the year before, making its total number of international students 6,500. The University of Western Ontario enrolled 4,759 international students. So together, the schools brought 11,259 international students into London.
Professor Mike Moffat, who teaches business, economics and public policy at the Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario, said: “We’re seeing a lot of single-family homes getting converted into student rentals. Previously, as in most communities with colleges and universities, there were kinds of informal boundaries between where the students live and the townies.”
The student area has been expanding out from many colleges by a block or two every year. So, the catchment area where students live is growing, particularly along bus lines, he explained. “The effect cascades through the entire housing system. What’s happening on the student side is causing shortages on family-sized homes because of those conversions into student rentals.
Provincial underfunding of HE
“International students are the biggest victims of our inability to plan. They are not the ones causing the problem. They are among the ones having to suffer because of the problem. They are the ones who have to double and sometimes triple up,” he told University World News in an interview last year.
The second area Miller referenced was the underfunding by the provinces of their public colleges and universities.
As the financial reports 2022-23 of McMaster University (Hamilton, Ontario) show, revenue from tuition fees rose by CA$8.4 million (US$6.2 million) or 1.9% to CA$445.8 million, “solely due to increased international enrolment and international tuition rate increases”. Tuition fees in Ontario have been essentially frozen for the past six years – even as grants to colleges and universities have been reduced.
Other provinces also see international students as being akin to ATMs.
At the University of Calgary in Alberta undergraduate tuition for this academic year for Canadians is CA$6,961, while for international students it is CA$26,849. At Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, tuition for Canadians is CA$8,983, while it is almost CA$10,000 higher for international students.
In the 2020 to 2021 academic year international students accounted for 68% of total tuition fees collected by Ontario’s colleges. At CA$1.7 billion (US$1.3 billion), it means international students contributed more to Ontario’s college system than did the government of Ontario, Canada’s richest province.
As Miller, a federal cabinet minister with no authority to set tuition, said: “I’m not the minister of postsecondary education underfunding … It’s a system that has some real integrity issues.
“It’s unacceptable that some private institutions have taken advantage of international students by operating under-resourced campuses, lacking support for students and charging high tuition fees, all while significantly increasing their intake of international students.”
Underscoring the fact that Canada still welcomes international students, Miller said: “It is a disservice to welcome international students in Canada knowing not all are getting the resources they need to succeed in Canada and having them return home disillusioned and disappointed in Canada’s education system.”
The case of India
Under the new scheme, visa numbers will be allocated to provinces according to their population, meaning Ontario, with a population of 15.8 million, will have the most visas. Smaller provinces, like Saskatchewan, which has 1.2 million people, and Newfoundland, which has 540,000, will see significant reductions.
The minister did not indicate that the government has a quota in mind for how many visas to allot to different countries. However, it is likely that India, the country that has sent the largest number of students to Canada for years, will receive fewer visas.
Last week, Miller announced that the number of international students from India in the last quarter of 2023 had dropped – by 86%, from 108,904 to 14,910.
Over the previous three quarters, according to ApplyBoard, visa applications from India had also fallen by 41%, meaning Canadian officials “processed 60,000 fewer applications” from July to October 2023 than the previous year.
ApplyBoard, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, cites two main reasons for this decline.
The first, as measured by social media postings, is concern about housing. ApplyBoard’s research found that between April and August 2023 “the number of articles written about housing in Canada increased five-fold versus the same period” the year before.
These findings accorded with those of Better Dwelling, Canada’s largest independent housing news outlet. According to Stephen Punwasi, Better Dwelling’s co-founder: “More and more international students have been posting on social media about the hardships they face in Canada, specifically calling out the high cost of living [rent being the greatest expense] and lack of opportunity promised.”
Political tensions
The second reason cited by ApplyBoard for the drop in applicants from India is the deep freeze Indo-Canadian relations has been in since mid-September when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced in the House of Commons that there were “credible” allegations that the government of Narendra Modi was behind the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh activist, in Surrey, British Columbia, a Vancouver suburb.
Modi angrily denied the allegations, which Trudeau called “an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty”.
At the G-20 summit in New Delhi in September, Canada “declared its deep concerns to the top intelligence and security officials of the Indian government. Last week at the G20 I brought them personally and directly to Prime Minister Modi in no uncertain terms”, Trudeau said. For his part, Modi expressed India’s concern about Canada harbouring Sikh separatists.
In October, after a tit-for-tat expulsion of a senior Indian diplomat by Canada and a Canadian diplomat by India, fearing that its diplomats would be stripped of their international immunity, Canada removed 41 of its 62 diplomats from India.
The withdrawal of these diplomats from Chandigarh, Mumbai and Bangalore, reduced Canada’s ability to process visas – at the same time as applications were dropping while the diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing was covered in Indian media.
Work permits
The regulations announced by Miller also limit international students’ access to work permits. Spouses of international students in masters and doctoral programs, as well as in medicine and law, will be eligible for work permits.
“Spouses of international students enrolled at other levels of study, including undergraduate college programs, will no longer be eligible” for work permits he said.
This cap will not apply to applicants already in Canada who seek to extend their studies, for example, move from an undergraduate programme to a graduate programme. Miller explained: “[As] it wouldn’t be fair to prevent someone from finishing the program. Nor will the cap have an effect on study permit holders currently in Canada.”
Miller’s trademark blunt language was on display when, albeit mixing his metaphors, he answered a reporter’s question about why he thinks things will be better after the two-year restriction on student visa numbers ends: “We’ve got two years to actually get the ship in order. It’s a bit of a mess and it’s time to rein it in.”
