What Canada can learn from Australia in dealing with an international student crisis

Open this photo in gallery:

David McKinnon is a former Canadian diplomat who has been posted to New Delhi, Canberra, Bangkok and, most recently, Colombo, where he served as Canada’s high commissioner to Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

Canada somehow finds itself at a point where one in five of the international students with study permits “did not have a record of studying at college or university here,” according to The Globe and Mail, with the no-show rate over 90 per cent at some private colleges. This is creating divisions domestically and damaging Canada’s reputation as a destination for quality education.

This cluster of policy failures at play is unusual, but there is precedent: Australia faced major challenges between 2008 and 2010 arising from unmanaged growth in students from India. I had a front-row seat to that crisis; I was managing Canada’s trade and investment program in India, which included education promotion, and my wife was working at the Australian mission in Delhi, looking after their political and economic program.

India had become a priority market for Canada at the time, and we were under pressure to significantly grow the number of Indian students. There was a push to be “more like the Australians,” who were enjoying economic growth as a result of policies to attract international students; from 2004 to 2009, the number of Indians studying in Australia rose from 30,000 to 97,000.

The pitfalls of these astronomical enrolments in Australia would eventually become evident, however. The essential problem was familiar: policies to attract students had the unintended consequence of bringing in some people who were less interested in getting an education and more focused on finding an easier path to permanent residency. Australia’s numbers were also driven largely by private colleges with dubious credentials.

What’s more, many Indian students had to work long hours to pay for their education, leaving them vulnerable. Eventually, attacks on Indian students were seized upon by the Indian media as being the result of racism – a troubling reality that was more complex than it was depicted – and the situation became a public relations mess for Australia and a major irritant in the bilateral relationship. Diplomats, ministers and other officials in Australia made it a priority to manage the crisis, which required engagement at the state and national levels in Australia, including calls between leaders and, ultimately, a visit to India by then-prime minister Kevin Rudd.

Meanwhile, the Canadian mission in Delhi did find a way to substantially increase the flow of serious students to Canada, even if the numbers were less spectacular than some in Canada wanted.

Thanks to thoughtful and collaborative management by the Canadian immigration team, the trade and immigration programs at the Canadian high commission in Delhi aligned our promotion and visa-processing efforts to support established degree-granting institutions, which essentially meant publicly funded ones. This created a virtuous circle, as these institutions understood the need to safeguard their reputations by using data to minimize the number of problematic applicants. The approach was adopted at some other Canadian missions as a best practice for the processing of student visas.

This approach was noticed by Australian officials too, some of whom came to Delhi to assess the program and learn lessons from their debacle. Indeed, I continued to hear about how Canada’s quality-driven approach had become a best practice for many in Canberra after I was posted there in late 2009.

So what lessons are there for Canada today, now that we face similar challenges? First, our governments must recognize any negative unintended consequences of their policy decisions, and promptly change course. Second, we have the expertise and experience to address difficult problems, but we need to listen to experts and have honest, thoughtful and proactive leadership at both federal and provincial levels, complemented by a strong public service. We will need to seriously reflect on what has gone wrong and the fact that issues of national significance are at stake, including social cohesion and our reputation abroad. Indeed, continued support for substantial immigration requires Canadians to have confidence that authorities have control over who gets into the country; that confidence is now at serious risk.

Publicly funded universities and colleges in Canada, as well as high-quality private institutions, should be demanding that the implicated layers of government fix this without delay, given the reputational damage being done. I also hope these institutions are reaching out to their Australian counterparts, as established universities there pushed their governments hard to take effective action, including closing down substandard institutions that were complicit in what was essentially a back-door immigration scheme.

There is a way out of this mess, but business as usual will not do it. Only honesty about what has gone wrong and what is at risk, and a genuine willingness to reflect and learn from others, will lead to a solution.