We need to fix the problem regardless of who's to blame
With Ontario failing to act, the federal government needs to do it
Online, the Trudeau government gets a lot of blame for the dire housing shortage. A recent discussion on Reddit: Is this fair, or is it due to factors outside their control?
I'd describe it like this:
(1) Housing is a ladder, it's all connected. When we don't have enough housing at one rung of the ladder, people don't disappear - they move down the ladder and we get trickle-down evictions.
(2) In the GTA and Metro Vancouver, there's a lot of opposition to new housing: you need to go through slow and painful per-site approval for each and every multifamily project.
(3) When Covid hit, there was a sudden surge in people working from home and needing more space.
(4) In addition, there's been a post-Covid surge in temporary residents, especially international students and especially at Ontario colleges.
I suppose you could argue that items (2) and (4) are really under the control of the provinces. (Municipal governments are created by provincial legislation, and provincial governments control caps on international students at universities and colleges.) In sharp contrast with the David Eby government in BC, which within one year passed legislation to legalize multiplexes across the province, the Ford government in Ontario has basically ignored the recommendations of its own housing task force, which have been sitting on its desk for two years, while messing around with the Greenbelt and having it blow up in its face. And the Ford government has also doubled the caps on international students at Ontario colleges.
But it doesn't matter: younger people are boiling mad, and the federal government is going to have to use whatever levers it has to fix the problems that the Ontario government is failing to tackle.
Sean Fraser is now using the Housing Accelerator Fund to convince municipalities to allow more housing without having to go through slow and painful per-site approvals, plus removing the GST on new rental housing. On the demand side, Marc Miller is pressuring the provinces (especially Ontario) to reduce their caps on international students.
Pointing fingers
Someone responded:
So you admit it's basically Ontario. And yet it's still expected that the feds just fix it. This is exactly why this country is fucking broken.
I hate the pointing-Spiderman meme. As a federal Liberal, I'm fine with blaming Doug Ford for screwing up housing in Ontario post-Covid, both on the supply side and the demand side - but I also want to fix the damn problem. And if that means the federal government negotiating with Ontario municipalities to fix their slow, painful, site-by-site approval process, and imposing a federal cap on Ontario international students, when it's the Ontario government that should be fixing these problems, so be it.
Ontario voters don't really care who fucked it up, they just want somebody to fix it.
Alex Usher on Twitter, back in August:
1/ A short history of Public-Private Partnership Arrangements at Ontario Colleges (or, why it's utterly ludicrous that the feds are taking the shit for all this student visa stuff)
2/ The first ones started around 2013: a couple of non-GTA colleges thinking they could more easily attract students if they had a campus in the GTA. Of course, they weren't going to build their own: so they hit on the idea of sub-contracting their curriculum to private colleges.
3/ Technically, the public colleges remain completely responsible for these students. It's their curriculum, it's their diplomas up for grabs. It's their recruitment process. If you think it is all "garbage curriculum" or whatever, your beef is with public not private colleges
4/ Following a thoughtful report by @davidtrick in (I think) 2017, the Wynne government moved to shut them all down. Basically, existing quality assurance had no way to regulate them and Ontario post-secondary's brand reputation was at risk.
5/ But then lo and behold the Ford government arrived. And, both due to govt's ideological predilection that private > public and b/c it was a way to avoid spending public $ on colleges, the Ford team thought this PPP stuff was AWESOME. Ban reversed, full speed ahead.
6/ Their first stab at regulation was the 2019 Binding Ministerial directive (now disappeared from the internet). It basically said you couldn't recruit more than 2x the number of intl students to a PPE than you had at the home campus.
7/ But, there was a grandfather clause. So places like Northern College, which had 4K intl students in Toronto and maybe 5 in Timmins were ok, as long as they made "good faith" efforts to reach the 2X target. And enforcement was basically non-existent so ¯\(ツ)/¯
8/ Anyway, with ongoing domestic tuition fee and grant freezes, almost all the non-GTA colleges eventually got in the game. I think there are now 15-16 in total, and last year there were 60K plus students in these arrangements.
9/ And then, in a move which can only be described as "using a firehose to spread napalm on a fire", the Ontario government told all of these colleges - hey, you know what? Screw the 2x rule. From now on, regardless of home campus size, you can each have 7500 in your GTA PPP.
10/ Kaboom.
11/ Could the feds have done anything in advance about this? Absolutely not. The provinces have total control over designated which institutions are "learning institutions" for the purpose of visas. That is absolutely not a federal responsibility. You want blame? It's on Ford.
12/ And you know what? Nobody is necessarily doing anything wrong here. The Harper government opened the door to post-secondary education as a path to PR. Institutions acted entrepreneurially to monetize this path. Aren't we always asking them to do more of that?
13/ Yes, it's quite possible that there is mis-selling going on, and we need to crack down on that. And the "pay-a-Canadian-college-and-get-a-citizenship" may seem unsavoury, but we have had lots of investor-citizenship schemes over the years: this is arguably more democratic.
14/ Much of the criticism stems from a belief that education provided by a private college is inherently worse than that provided by a public one even if curriculum is identical. YMMV, I suspect. Some will be good, other not. Not a strong argument on its own.
15/Mad because agents mislead students about various things? Mad about lack of quality assurance in PPPs? That's fair. It's also 100% within the power of the provincial government (not the feds) to do something here. Ford government has chosen to do the opposite every time.
16/ The feds are - extremely clumsily - now trying to work out what they can do about this. Whichever way they go they will make people mad. And it's OK to be mad. But understand that this is 100% a problem of a provincial govt's deliberately awful policies.
17/ And we should build more housing, obvs.
/fin
Right now there's no federal cap on international student visas. The provinces set those caps - as Alex Usher points out, Doug Ford doubled the caps in Ontario.
But since Ford has screwed things up this badly, the federal government needs to figure out how to impose a federal cap on Ontario, ASAP. Before July 2024, when the next wave of international students arrives. (To be clear, it's a good thing that young people want to study and work in Canada - but we're in the middle of a terrible housing shortage!)
Scott Reid on Doug Ford's public image:
When Ford hits trouble, he'll spend a couple days, like all political leaders, going no, no, it's not a problem, no no no, stop, you know you're wrong, I'm right. And then he'll just get up one day and go, all right everybody else is right, I'm wrong, golly gee willikers, folks, I'm so sorry, I got it wrong, and you know what, we're gonna try to do the right thing, and reverse his course completely. And that usually stems it.
And then he also has the added benefit that everybody thinks he's kind of the A&W Root Beer bear and kind of too dumb to really run the government, therefore too dumb to be accountable. And therefore they go, well, shit you know it wasn't really his fault, he didn't really know what was going on, and at least he's doing the right thing by apologizing. And so he skates away on this stuff.
What the numbers look like
The numbers for 2023 are particularly eye-popping, even in comparison to the previous five years (2017-2022):
To be clear, the international students themselves aren’t to blame: the Ford government is basically exploiting them to pay for Ontario’s post-secondary system. The root problem here is that Ontario cut and then froze domestic tuition in 2019. Ontario’s funding of domestic college students is now only 40% of what other provinces provide. Queen’s University is in financial trouble in part because it hasn’t been bringing in enough international students to compensate.
A disproportionate share of international students attending colleges are in Ontario.
International-student visa approvals by Ontario colleges and universities, with universities highlighted. Colleges are bringing in many more international students than universities.
The numbers would be even higher if the federal government weren’t already rejecting nearly half of visa applications, e.g. due to the financial requirement (just doubled from $10,000 to $20,000), or fraudulent documents. Nicholas Keung, Toronto Star: Canadian schools are accepting international students by the thousands — but nearly half aren't being allowed into the country.
According to the data from the Immigration Department, among Ontario universities with larger international student populations, U of T had a 90 per cent approval rate; Waterloo and McMaster, both around 86.5 per cent; Western and Windsor, both at 80 per cent; Ottawa, 77.6 per cent; Carleton, 76 per cent; Brock, 71.5 per cent; and York, 66 per cent. Trent and Algoma universities had 56 per cent and 52 per cent of applications granted respectively, while Laurentian had a dismal 20.7 per cent study permit approval rate.
Among the public colleges in the province, Lambton had 70 per cent of the study permit applications approved, while most other colleges had rates ranging between 50 per cent and 69 per cent.
Conestoga College — the learning institution with the highest volume of study permit applications in the system across Canada — had 51 per cent of its 61,612 applications approved in the period. The approval rates for Niagara College (main campuses) and St. Clair were 42.6 per cent and 42 per cent respectively, while Loyalist College was at 47 per cent, though its Toronto Business College campus had a 65 per cent grant rate.
Education agent and policy researcher Earl Blaney said it's a waste of the immigration system's scarce resources when almost one in every two study permit applications are refused because subpar files jam up the system, causing processing delays. He blames the high refusals on what he called a "mass volume" recruitment approach by many of the learning institutions in the past five years.
Some suggestions
At this point all eyes are on Marc Miller. He doubled the financial requirement for international students, and he's put pressure on provincial governments to lower the caps on international students at colleges and universities - those are both good steps. But what happens next?
Mike Moffatt points out that we need action pretty quickly: the next wave of international students will arrive on Canada Day 2024. We can't have 2024 be a repeat of 2023, with 3.3% population growth.
Some suggestions:
Reduce the number of hours per week that international students can work off campus back to 20, starting May 1. (This will reduce demand for study in Canada, and it's squarely within federal jurisdiction.)
Set a province-wide cap on the number of international student visa applications - perhaps just for Ontario, BC, and Nova Scotia. (The reason for limiting applications is that it takes time to process a visa, so it's harder to limit the number of visas issued.) It's then up to each province to decide how it wants to allocate those applications to different post-secondary institutions. Alex Usher discusses this issue at length: Caps on Student Visas.
How should the caps be set? The 2023 numbers were far greater than the preceding five-year average - something like 4X. Consider them to be an advance against the numbers for the next four years, 2024-2027. In other words, the caps for 2024-2027 should be set so that the five-year average matches the previous five-year average, which means that they should be set to about
50%25% of the preceding five-year average.Ontario's international student numbers are particularly high. Set Ontario's cap based on its share of population.
The provinces may object on constitutional grounds. Quebec rejects cap on student visas floated by Ottawa to address housing crisis, August 2023. In that case, the bluntest possible instrument would be to further reduce the number of hours that international students can work each week. Alex Usher doesn’t think this will be a problem in Ontario: “Think the Ontario Conservatives will fight back? Guess again. That caucus is filled with 905-area MPPs whose constituents are screaming about rent. If the Liberals look like seizing the housing issue from the Conservatives through measures like this, you can bet the Conservatives will fall in line pretty quickly.”
On the Temporary Foreign Worker side, the changes introduced in April 2022 (making it easier to hire TFWs) have been extended until August 2024. Let them expire after that. When the economy's overheated and there's more jobs than workers, expanding the workforce can help to cool down inflation, but inflationary pressure seems to be diminishing now. The big challenge now is the housing shortage.
I posted a link to this article on a local subreddit. It raised discussion---unfortunately to a large extent more heat than light, unfortunately. I wonder if you'd like to address one statement that I've heard raised several times. There's a counter argument going around that says cities have already OK'd over a million new housing platforms across the country but developers are just sitting on them because they are just hording land to increase the cost of housing, or, there just aren't enough tradesmen in Canada to build the housing. (I've heard both statments.)
I haven't taken these claims seriously because I've never seen any mention of this in the academic papers I've read on the subject. But it is a counter-factual that has gained a lot of traction and I don't really have an answer to this. Have you looked into the issue? I'd like to hear your response.
Your best post yet. A real tour-de-force. Have you been sending it out to the media?