Students walk along St. George St. near the University of Toronto, on Nov 23.Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail
When is a clampdown on international students coming to Canada not a clampdown on international students coming to Canada?
When it’s a Liberal government plan to toughen the rules for studying in Canada that is sold as a measure to protect international students from abuse.
Last week, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced that, as of Jan. 1, international students that want to to qualify for a study permit will need to prove they have $20,635 in the bank to cover living costs. The amount doesn’t include tuition and travel costs.
This more than doubles the previous cost-of-living requirement, which stood at $10,000 for two decades. It is an update for which Ottawa should be lauded for bringing in, and criticized for failing to do so much sooner.
Mr. Miller also said he is considering limiting off-campus work for international students to 20 or 30 hours a week, a decrease from current levels.
The minister said these changes will “protect international students from financially vulnerable situations and exploitation.” There’s no question that they will help. It’s outrageous to tell someone coming to Canada that $833 a month will cover their room, board and sundry expenses, and then oblige them to work long hours to make ends meet.
But regardless of any stated motivation, the upshot will be a reduction in the number of international students in Canada, something a majority of Canadians have said in polls that they favour in order to mitigate the country’s housing crisis.
The Liberals, as well as the opposition parties, have been loath to blame immigrants, temporary foreign workers, international students and refugees for a housing crisis that has been fuelled by rapidly growing demand combined with a stagnant supply. They should be loath to, because it is the politicians who are to blame.
Until the housing crisis emerged, Ottawa and the provinces turned a blind eye to shady “diploma mills” in Canada that sell dodgy educations as a back door to permanent residency. They also let the temporary foreign workers program turn into a massive cheap labour boondoggle that brings hundreds of thousands into the country.
Ottawa made a shocking error this year when it secretly waived rules for temporary visitors that required them to prove they would leave the country when their visas expired, leading to a huge surge in refugee claims at airports. The Trudeau government has also refused to alter its plan to increase annual immigration targets.
The consequences are troubling in the context of a housing shortage. Ottawa plans to accept 1.5-million new permanent residents between now and the end of 2026. Until Mr. Miller’s announcement last week, it expected just over one million international students in 2024, 1.1 million in 2025 and 1.28 million in 2026. Temporary foreign worker approvals jumped 68 per cent last year. The backlog for refugee claims surpassed 100,000 this year.
Ottawa has put itself in a spot where it has to act, if only out of political expediency. But it also has to be careful not to open itself to criticism that it is “anti-immigrant” by acting too radically.
Hence Mr. Miller’s new policies that are designed to ensure international students “are supported when they come to our country.”
In reality, these policies will reduce the number of applications for study permits. So, too, should Mr. Miller’s threat to refuse to issue travel visas to students that have obtained study permits for colleges and universities that fail to “accept the number of students that they can provide adequate supports for, including housing options.” (Students need both a study permit and a travel visa to come to Canada.)
But he’s clearly only willing to go so far, because he still intends to allow international students to work off-campus part-time or, at 30 hours a week, very close to full-time.
That would be counterproductive, to say the least. As this space previously argued, international students should be limited to working on-campus – the whole problem is that “shady operators,” as Mr. Miller calls them, exploit the right to work off-campus to recruit students.
He won’t be fixing the root of the problem if he doesn’t address that issue. If he won’t address that issue, it’s likely because he can’t do something that might be so effective that it looks like an actual clampdown on international students.