Although international education brings in over $22 billion in economic activity to Canada each year, the rapidly expanding international student program has also brought a host of problems, causing Ottawa to reverse course and stem the flow of students.
The federal government issued approximately 682,000 international study permits in 2023, amounting to some 1,868 permits per day. However, due to increasing issues relating to housing shortage and affordability and companies registered as institutional institutes abusing the program the government said it would cut back on admissions, while some provinces are introducing their own limits on international student intake.
The issue garnered more attention this month regarding how much security checking could have been done given the high intake numbers after an alleged terrorism attempt incident. A Pakistani national was arrested in Quebec on Sept. 4 while allegedly trying to cross into the United States to carry out a terrorist attack against Jews in New York.
Coupled with increasing levels of immigration and temporary foreign workers, Canadians have begun questioning the country’s international student program. A poll from April by Navigator from April indicated that 58 percent of Canadians believe there are too many international students studying in Canada, up from 49 percent in October 2023. An August Leger poll suggested that 65 percent of Canadians surveyed believe the country’s current immigration plan will admit too many immigrants.
New Limits
Earlier this year, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced that Canada would put a two-year cap on new study permits. He gave a target of 485,000 approved permits for 2024, based on a net-zero growth model where the number of students coming to Canada in 2024 would equal the number whose permits expire this year.Under this model, he explained, the actual target is 364,000 new permits, as around 20 percent of students (97,000 of 485,000) typically apply for an extension each year, and adding on a small buffer of 24,000 would return the total to 485,000.
Prior to that, Miller had announced in December 2023 that Ottawa would more than double the cost-of-living requirement for international students—which had not been changed since the 2000s—from $10,000 to $20,635. This amount would be in addition to their first year of tuition and travel costs.
In its latest announcement, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) said on Sept. 18 that it would further reduce the targeted number of new international study permits to be issued next year, lowering it to 437,000 for 2025, 10 percent less than the 2024 target of 485,000. IRCC said the intake cap for 2026 will remain the same as that for 2025.
‘Time to Rein It In’
The number of new international study permits issued by Ottawa each year has been steadily increasing since 2015, the first year for which data was provided in a dataset from IRCC. The number only dipped in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. IRCC says permits were issued to approximately 219,000 students in 2015, 264,000 in 2016, 314,000 in 2017, 354,000 in 2018, and 400,500 in 2019 before the number dropped to 255,500 in 2020.In 2021 the number of permits issued rose to 443,000, nearly double that of the previous year, then increased to 548,000 in 2022 and to 682,000 in 2023, when Ottawa was handing out around 1,900 permits per day.
In January, Miller announced that the two-year cap on the number of permits was to “protect a system that has become so lucrative that it has opened a path for its abuse.”
“It’s a bit of a mess,” he said of the student visa program at the time. “It’s time to rein it in.”
When the 364,000 cap on new student visas for this year was announced in January, it was noted as a 35 percent decrease from the nearly 560,000 issued last year, apparently based on IRCC’s figure up to October 2023 known at that time.
The original study permit intake cap applied only to post-secondary undergraduate students, not those seeking visas for master’s programs or doctoral degrees or elementary and high school students. However, the 2025–26 cap will include master’s and doctoral students who will now have to submit a provincial or territorial attestation letter.
Miller also said some school operators have been taking advantage of international students by charging high tuition fees while in some cases providing a poor education. He said there are also instances where the visa program is being used as a way for people to parlay a student visa into a permanent residency.
“It is not the intention of this program to have sham commerce degrees or business degrees that are sitting on top of a massage parlour that someone doesn’t even go to and then they come into the province and drive an Uber,” he said.
In July, the federal immigration department announced it was implementing new regulations to address what it called “unethical behaviours” among universities and colleges that abuse Canada’s foreign student program. The amendments will require schools to notify IRCC of all foreign students enrolled, and give federal inspectors new powers to ensure the schools are complying with the new regulations.
In B.C., Minister of Post-Secondary Education Selina Robinson announced in January that no new post-secondary institutions will be allowed to enroll international students for two years, as too many students are being exploited by “bad actors.”
A total of 982,880 foreigners were studying in Canada last year under federal study permits, as first reported by Blacklock’s Reporter in February based on an Inquiry of Ministry tabled in the House of Commons.
Housing and Health Care Issues
The rise in international students has accompanied significant increases in Canada’s population in recent years, largely due to permanent and temporary migration, including temporary foreign workers. The population rose by over 1 million people for the first time in Canada’s history in 2022, and hit 40 million by June 2023. The population surge has put a considerable strain on infrastructure, housing, and health care, raising questions about the sustainability of the trend.In late 2023, two Ontario food banks, located in Oshawa and Brampton, announced that they were closing their doors to international students. Several food banks across Ontario began reporting that some international students were deliberately exploiting the system, while others were simply unaware of how food banks function.
While IRCC has said international students must provide “proof of financial support” before arriving in Canada, a Daily Bread Food Bank survey of 180 Toronto international post-secondary students released last September indicated that the respondents were spending an average of $1,517 per month excluding tuition fees—nearly double what the federal government suggests as the cost of living.
Housing affordability is also a key issue in Canadian politics. The average rent for all residential property types was $2,187 in August, a year-over-year increase of 3.3 percent, Rentals.ca said in its September 2024 rent report. The average price of a home was $649,100 in August 2024, only a 0.1 percent increase from August 2023, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. The federal government was blamed for its lack of focus on building affordable housing, but attention soon turned to the influx of newcomers squeezing existing supply.
Similar to allegations against some educational institutions, there have also been allegations of landlords exploiting international students. Brampton city councillor Rowena Santos recently said that some landlords have attempted to ask female students for sexual favours in exchange for discounted housing, CityNews reported.
