Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Marc Miller rises during Question Period in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, on Oct. 9.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Marc Miller has been Minister of Immigration for nearly 15 months, and after a year of slow-walking the walk-back of his government’s previous policies, he’s finally got some results to trumpet.
In August, the number of new and renewed visas issued to foreign students dropped by 45 per cent compared to August of 2023. There were 97,610 study permits that became effective two months ago, versus 178,000 a year earlier.
This is significant. An out-of-control student visa system became a font of immigration scams and educational devaluation, and Mr. Miller admitted as much long ago. But month after month, the numbers didn’t show that he was making progress – until now.
Data provided by Mr. Miller’s department, and not yet available online, show the positive trend continued in the month of September. Good.
Mr. Miller has also made a number of changes to the system to signal to foreign students that paying tuition to any educational institution is no longer an easy path to permanent residency – and to signal to those institutions that the no-holds-barred cash grab of the last few years is over.
The most significant change involves the post-graduation work permit, or PGWP. As of next month, university visa students will still be able to get PGWPs of up to three years, but most college programs will lose their eligibility. Only college graduates in five broad areas – agriculture and agri-food; health care; science, technology, engineering and mathematics; trade and transport – will be eligible to remain in Canada and work.
I’ve written column after column on the many ways the Trudeau government broke our immigration system. Mr. Miller, to his credit, has started Canada down the road of repairing what was broken in the student visa program.
But much more remains to be done. We need to start by understanding the benefits of foreign students – and figuring out how to maximize those benefits.
We need to make like the heroes of Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, who stopped managing by gut, and started rigorously following the data. We need to Moneyball the student visa program.
Let’s start with a question. Why does Canada want foreign students? Two answers: money and immigration.
It makes sense for Canada to draw a large share of our immigrants from former foreign students. They studied here, they’ve got work experience here and they’re already here.
But in recent years, Canada has increasingly drawn immigrants from among foreign graduates of low-quality Canadian educational programs, whose jobs are in low-productivity and low-wage fields.
Canada reverse-Moneyballed the student-to-immigrant pathway. We got it backward. Ottawa did the same thing with temporary foreign worker streams, and the overall economic immigration stream.
There was no thinking about the long term, or the big picture.
That’s how we ended up with the University of Waterloo getting fewer than 1,900 foreign student permits in 2023, while on the other side of town, Conestoga College saw its number of visas more than quadruple since 2019, to nearly 32,000.
A recent study of decades of labour market outcomes for thousands of Waterloo graduates, conducted by three Waterloo economists led by Professor Mikal Skuterud, finds that foreign graduates of the “MIT of the North” are pulling in high salaries and out-earning their Canadian peers, including Canadian-born Waterloo grads.
It shows that the data exist to predict which visa students in which programs are likely to land the best jobs, and hence contribute the most to growing Canada’s gross domestic product per capita. That’s who should be getting the limited number of student visas, PGWPs and economic immigration slots.
As such, Mr. Miller’s new rules are progress, but still not entirely on the mark. The feds remain focused on the myth of “labour shortages,” so some college programs offering pathways to lower-skilled work – from health aides to bus drivers – are still eligible for student visas and PGWPs.
We need to get smarter about this. More MIT of the North. Less Puppy Mills of Southwestern Ontario.
Beyond potential immigrants, the second reason Canada wants foreign students is money, primarily in the form of tuition. Education is an export industry, except that instead of sending a product overseas, we bring the students (and their money) to Canada.
Given that the number of student visas is not infinite, priority should go to programs charging the highest tuition. By happy coincidence, many of the highest-value programs, producing graduates who may become high-wage immigrants, are also the highest-tuition programs.
For example, annual tuition and fees for international students at Waterloo ranges from $50,000 to $73,000. That’s roughly four times Conestoga’s international tuition.
It means that each international student at Waterloo is paying as much as four students at the crosstown college. The government of Ontario, which long prioritized visas for colleges as an easy cash grab, needs to do some basic math. It needs to cash grab more efficiently.
Moneyballing the system means fewer student visas, but going to programs educating the most economically productive future immigrants, and programs charging the highest tuition. The two aren’t exactly the same, but there is huge overlap.
The path forward is clear.