Marc Miller imposes province-wide caps on international student numbers
Ontario's been exploiting international students in huge numbers
The post-Covid housing deficit
From a housing point of view, we basically have a post-Covid housing deficit: high demand (driven by remote work as well as a remarkable surge in international students) colliding with a painfully slow, revenue-maximizing approval process at the municipal level.
We need to increase housing supply, but we also need to reduce population growth to a level where supply can keep up. It's like cutting immigration when unemployment is high: it also makes sense to cut immigration when vacancy rates are really low.
Up to now, it's the provinces that have set caps for international students at their colleges and universities, and Ontario in particular has been expanding the numbers at a remarkable rate, as a way of paying for its post-secondary education system.
Ontario has a disproportionate share of international students:
Population growth for 2023 is really startling, even in comparison to the average for the previous five years 2017-2022. It’s being driven primarily by “non-permanent residents,” a category which includes both international students and temporary foreign workers:
Within the non-permanent resident category, growth is being driven primarily by new international students. The number of study permit holders rose from 800K at the end of 2022 to 1.03M.
An exchange on Reddit:
Who issues their visas, and why did the federal government not consider caps sooner?
This is where we get into the finger-pointing meme. Doug Ford raises the caps so Ontario colleges can bring in a lot more international students, rents in Ontario go through the roof, and then he turns around and says, you should have stopped me, the federal government should have rejected their visa applications. (In fact the federal government’s already been rejecting about half of them.)
Federal cap on international students
On Monday, Marc Miller announced that the federal government is imposing its own cap on international students at colleges and universities in each province (especially Ontario and BC), with each province’s cap proportional to its share of population. For Ontario, this translates to about a 50% cut.
Miller emphasized that the students themselves are not to blame - it’s a good thing that young people want to come to Canada to study and work, but they're basically being exploited in huge numbers.
The aim of the changes is to ensure that there's no net growth in the number of students. (I expect this would be a bit tricky to measure, since there's a pipeline to post-graduate work permits and permanent residency. With the giant bulge in study permits in September 2022 and 2023, this will result in a bulge in work permit numbers in two years, reduced somewhat by the PPP change described below.)
The cap will be in place for at least the next two years. After that, IRCC has been working on some kind of system to prioritize trusted institutions - but my guess is that Ottawa could also just leave the cap in place.
There’s three major changes:
Province-wide caps, resulting in a cut of about 50% to Ontario. "Effective immediately, applicants must provide a provincial attestation with their study permit application" - starting immediately, no visas will be issued until provinces start providing these attestations.
Post-graduate work permits will not be available to graduates of private colleges which are licensing a public college’s name and curriculum. (This primarily affects Ontario’s notorious public-private college partnerships, or PPPs.)
Open work permits will no longer be available to spouses of college and undergraduate students, starting in September 2024. They’ll still be available for spouses of grad students.
Post-Graduate Work Program
Alex Usher summarizes the changes: The New International Student Regime.
I wrote back here about the problems created by hard caps: mainly, that once you cap you have to decide how to ration the opportunities available for students. I suggested at the time that if the IRCC went down that route, the best way to do it was to allocate spaces by province and allow each province to figure out the rationing. I also suggested that an even better way to solve the problem was to avoid caps altogether and just take steps to reduce demand for Canadian higher education.
As it happens, the feds took both pieces of advice to heart.
He explains the importance of the Post-Graduate Work Program:
The PGWP has been a key factor in the rise of international students in Canada. First implemented by the Harper government, the idea stemmed from the observation that many immigrants had a hard time getting a foot in the door with respect to the labour market because they lacked “Canadian experience.” It allowed graduates of Canadian programs to stay in the country and work after graduation. By doing so, they could get Canadian work experience and then apply through the “Canadian Experience Class” to get permanent residence. Thus, Canadian education became a recognized “front door” pathway to citizenship.
The numbers for this worked when the number of students coming into the country were in the low hundreds of thousands and most of them were university students. The math changed when numbers tripled or quadrupled and many of them went to college and found relatively menial jobs after graduation. Suddenly, the pipeline of students heading through the PGWP vastly outnumbered the number of spots available in the “Canadian Experience Class” (which I believe is capped in the mid tens of thousands). Agents—if not the universities and colleges themselves—have been promising a route to citizenship for years. For a while now, that proposal has not been a realistic future for many. PGWP reform was inevitable.
With Monday’s announcement, programs at Public-Private Partnership institutions in Ontario will no longer be eligible for the PGWP.
It’s huge. Ontario colleges outside the GTA have upwards of 125,000 international students in GTA-area PPPs. Without the promise of a post-graduation work visa, it is hard to see how those spots are going to stay filled. My very rough guess is that this is going to take at least $1.5 billion in revenue out of Ontario colleges’ hands. They’ll have fewer students to teach so their costs will drop too, but still, this is going to hurt. A lot. I’d wager a couple of the northern colleges, who used PPPs as a way to escape the brutal economic of teaching in the more sparsely populated north, will be in need of a bailout soon.
Impact on provinces
Alex Usher: What Comes Next. He divides the provinces into four categories:
Easy (Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland): the “share of population” cap is well above current numbers.
Borderline (Manitoba, New Brunswick): the cap matches current numbers.
Problematic (BC, Nova Scotia, PEI): some colleges and universities are going to lose out, and each province will have to ration the numbers, e.g. BC will have to decide whether to prioritize public institutions over private ones.
Hugely problematic: Ontario.
Ontario is, not to put too fine a point on it, a shit show. My impression is that the Ford government, which has been throwing gasoline on the international student fire ever since it got into the office, mainly so it could avoid having to actually spend over its own money on post-secondary education, is in no way equipped policy-wise to deal with the mess it has just been handed.
The first policy question to be answered before getting to the issue of caps is: what the heck to do about the public-private partnership colleges currently strewn around the GTA? As it is, with the graduates denied access to the post-graduate work visa program, it will be difficult for any of them to stay in business, since satisfying this demand is largely their reason for being. That would be brutal on a couple of levels: first on the colleges themselves who would have to teach out their existing students with essentially no money coming in, and second on their parent public colleges who rely on the margin between per-student tuition and per-student payments to the PPPs in order to keep operating under a system in which per-student funding is just 44% of what it is in the other nine provinces.
He talks about a couple options: the public colleges buying out their private partners and operating them; getting a bailout from the province; the private colleges seeking to grant degrees themselves by applying to Ontario’s Post-secondary Education Quality Assessment Board.
BC crackdown coming
Rob Shaw, The Orca: B.C. reforms long overdue as Ottawa caps international students.
B.C. is preparing its own crackdown on international students in shady colleges and universities, in a bid to mitigate new caps from the federal government.
Post-Secondary Minister Selina Robinson is expected to unveil the strategy in the next couple of weeks.
The framework was pitched to Ottawa in advance of Monday’s federal announcement of a 35 per cent cut nationally of undergraduate study permits for 2024, or 364,000 students.
Robinson has been working on the strategy for the better part of a year, after identifying a concerning spike in international students that started at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic.
But the reforms have taken on renewed urgency in recent weeks, as it became clear Immigration Minister Marc Miller intended to push forward quickly with federally mandated caps for provinces on international study permits. Miller had called the situation “out of control.”
A similar story from Kevin Maimann at CBC: B.C., Ontario vow to crack down on diploma mill schools exploiting international students.
More reactions
The federal government briefed university and college association heads on the Friday before the announcement, telling them what was coming on Monday. Kristin Rushowy and Nicholas Keung, Toronto Star: Canada to limit study permits for international students.
Barbara Patrocino, QP Briefing:
Katrina King, a spokesperson for Colleges and Institutes Canada, which represents these post-secondary institutions, said that capping the number of international students coming to Canada wasn't the best solution to tackle the country's housing crisis.
“Although implementing a cap on international students may seem to provide temporary relief, it could have lasting adverse effects on our communities, including exacerbating current labour shortages,” she said.
“Furthermore, we want to emphasize that students are not to blame for Canada’s housing crisis; they are among those most impacted."
This is maddening. Colleges keep hiding behind the “students aren’t to blame” line to avoid accountability.
We’re not blaming the students, we’re blaming the institutions, some of whom are making $100M+ annual profits off the backs of vulnerable students.
Marco Vigliotti and Davis Legree in QP Briefing report on the initial reaction to Monday’s announcement from the Conservatives and NDP, as well as Ontario.
In a statement to iPolitics, Jill Dunlop said international students provide meaningful benefits to Ontario, but that some bad actors are exploiting the system by taking advantage of students with “false promises of guaranteed employment.”
Reaction from columnists:
Tony Keller, Globe and Mail: Thanks to Marc Miller, the immigration system is (slightly) less broken
Shannon Proudfoot, Globe and Mail: On rare occasions, politicians do right by admitting their mistakes
On Reddit, u/qaz436: Federal Liberals finally change Doug Ford’s dirty diaper.
I hate this guy— wish someone would bully him out of the public