Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Minister Marc Miller speaks during a news conference, Sept. 18. By capping the number of new international student visas, Miller acknowledged government policy had gone off the rails and took steps to correct it.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
The boom in the number of international students coming to Canada has been curbed. How do we rate this kind of success?
For years, the ranks had grown year over year, ballooning the number of temporary residents in Canada to roughly three million in a surge of unplanned population growth. Now, that trend is being reversed.
That’s happening because Immigration Minister Marc Miller did something that doesn’t happen very often in politics: He acknowledged government policy had gone off the rails and took steps to correct it.
In the spring, he capped the number of new student visas. Now, new statistics obtained by The Globe and Mail show that change has kicked in just in time for the new school year.
In August, typically the peak month for the arrival of foreign students, the number coming on new study permits fell to just over half of those issued a year earlier: 80,364, down from 152,542. The drop in the number of new permits – figures that do not include extensions of existing permits – continued in September, when 29,081 arrived, compared with 53,863 a year prior.
The significance of that is not just that there are fewer new foreign students in colleges and universities this fall. It’s that Canada is putting the brakes on the rapid growth in the number of temporary residents that has seen the population increase at a nearly-unprecedented pace.
Perhaps more important than the cap, Mr. Miller has moved to limit eligibility for the three-year post-graduate work permits so that fewer foreign students will become temporary workers. Together, the measures will curb the growth in the numbers of temporary residents.
“I think they are very effective,” said Benjamin Tal, deputy chief economist at CIBC World Markets. He argues the unplanned growth fuelled a housing crisis that is still having dire impacts.
Credit Mr. Miller, then, for taking action – in the face of a lot of screaming from the presidents of colleges and universities that have grown dependent on the higher fees charged to foreign students.
What’s most striking is that he is fixing a mistake that, at least in large part, was made by his own Liberal government.
After he was moved to the immigration portfolio in 2023, Mr. Miller didn’t smile and say everything is fine. He matter-of-factly admitted there was a problem. He talked about Canada’s addiction to temporary workers, problems in the student-visa system, and said the government would have to change course.
That’s not standard practice in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government. In fact, it is something glaringly missing from Mr. Trudeau’s own politics.
If the Prime Minister had been able to tell Canadians a year or two ago that he’d made mistakes and was setting out to fix them, he’d have a lot more of their goodwill now. Yet he didn’t share Mr. Miller’s instincts.
Few in Mr. Trudeau’s government have followed Mr. Miller’s approach. Former Indigenous services minister Jane Philpott was disarmingly candid about problems in Indigenous communities, but she, too, was a rarity. Mr. Miller, who later held the same portfolio, plainly admitted governments failings and said things that weren’t written into the talking points.
Perhaps he wasn’t as worried about being frank in ways that would worry the controlling staffers in the Prime Minister’s Office because he had been a close friend of Mr. Trudeau since the two were schoolmates at Montreal’s Jean-de-Brébeuf college.
But it turned out that conceding mistakes made him more credible when he claimed successes. Now, Mr. Miller can claim one if arresting the unchecked growth in international students.
Sure, it’s probably too late to do much for the political fortunes of the embattled Liberal government. And it is only a partial success in fixing a big government mistake.
To be fair, it wasn’t only a federal mistake. Provincial governments, notably Ontario’s, encouraged the unchecked foreign-student boom and failed to regulate an education industry that sometimes made false promises to rip off students. But Ottawa didn’t grasp the problem, or control the numbers, until it was out of hand.
Whoever is in power in Ottawa will be dealing with the consequences for years. Hundreds of thousands of temporary residents who hope to stay permanently will either have to be absorbed into the numbers of permanent residents or told to go home.
Yet Mr. Miller has taken steps that have turned around the trend. It’s hard for governments to claim credit for acknowledging their big, bad mistakes, and fixing them. But in politics, that should be rated as a rare success.