In January, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced new restrictions on international education in Canada, including cuts to spousal work permits for certain international students and a 35 per cent reduction in the number of study permits issued. These cuts are especially pronounced in Ontario, which expects to see a 50 per cent reduction in study permits.
Experts says these cuts will further challenge a post-secondary sector that is grappling with an increased reliance on international-student tuition. Institutions across the province say that the cuts will hurt their ability to provide high-quality education — and that Ontario’s communities cannot afford to lose this skilled workforce.
But how did we get here? And how can the province move forward? TVO Today speaks with Roopa Trilokekar, an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at York University who focuses on government policy in international education, about the reasons for the announcement, how students might be affected — and what comes next.
Kunal Chaudhary: How did we get to this point?
Roopa Trilokekar: In Canada, we don’t have a central Ministry of Education, so things are not as coordinated and collaborative as they are in several other countries. You can see, in studying other countries, the slightly different ways that they’ve approached the marketization of international education. In Canada, of course, the universities were the ones that initiated the recruitment of international students. Then, the federal government in the 1990s decided to enhance Canada’s image through trade and marketing, in part because it realized there was a lot of interest from the higher-education sector here.
This marketing initiative resulted in what were called “Canadian Education Centres,” especially in a lot of Asian countries, because that’s a big market. Over time, there have been several initiatives to market Canada’s educational opportunities.
Universities and colleges squeezed for funding realized that this was a great source of revenue. In the last 20 years, it’s just taken off as a business and spread like wildfire.
Federal government officials are well aware of numbers rising: they’re the ones issuing the visas. They have been encouraging it. So these cuts are a very interesting turn.
Chaudhary: Ontario’s own expert panel has acknowledged that “many Ontario colleges and universities have passed the point where they could survive financially with only domestic students.” How might the new restrictions play out in the province?
Trilokekar: I expect private colleges and public-private college partnerships to be impacted greatly. Other programs, which have 50 to 100 per cent enrolment of international students — those are going to be very badly influenced as well.
The college sector in Ontario has brought in the largest number of international students; if you look at Canada compared to other countries, that’s an anomaly. Some of these colleges are not going to be given authorization to enrol as many international students.. In the U.S. and Germany, a lot of the international students in those countries are post-graduate students, graduate students. They’re not undergraduates or college students, but Canada has always had it differently.
Chaudhary: Why?
Trilokekar: The motivation to have international students used to be to bring in higher-level talent. A lot of graduate programs in the U.S. and Canada, especially in the science and engineering fields, are not filled with domestic students. International students were encouraged to enrol in universities — it was a fair trade for the opportunity to train high-level talent in various ways.
In Canada, as international education has come to be driven primarily by economics, this balance has shifted to a surge in undergraduate students — because they pay 100 per cent of their tuitions and fees. There has always been a dollar value attached to international students, even though verbally we say all kinds of things about bringing in diversity.
The U of Ts of the world are not going to get affected; it’s the smaller institutions that are likely to have challenges because they cannot depend on the numbers and funding that they have depended on.
Personally, I think there’s a shift in Canada we haven’t seen in decades. Canada used to be proud of its pro-immigration stance, and international students were part of that. Even during COVID, when other countries shut their borders tightly for international students, we didn’t.
There’s a shift in our public perception of immigration and “outsiders” coming in. International students are an easy target when this happens, because they’re the first ones to be looked down on as outsiders. We have all kinds of perceptions about them that are sometimes far from their own realities. So part of this is the federal government trying to position itself to show the public that it’s really taking control of this problematic situation that it’s created.
Chaudhary: How might this influence the experience of international students themselves?
Trilokekar: In many different ways. We’ve seen media reports about places like Punjab, in India, and the visa mills that have developed there, the recruiters who are very unethically doing all kinds of things to send people here. There are lots of people invested in this whole process who are making money out of it. Meanwhile, students are given the impression that it’s possible to work and make money while studying. That presents a lot more challenges because the cost of living is unbelievable. I’ve never known of a time when international students had to struggle the way that has been reported the last few years, but I don’t think the government has that perspective at all. I don’t think they’re worried about individuals. They may say otherwise, but I don’t think their concern is the individual student coming in and how their experience is getting influenced.
Chaudhary: Should that be part of its consideration?
Trilokekar: Personally, I think the problem is we are looking at a program meant for education purposes and confusing it with our own immigration objectives and labour-market requirements. This happened in Australia, and we should have learned from its government. It retracted the same way we are retracting. But then it came back and readjusted — the pressure from the universities and colleges to the government is going to be pretty strong. That funding cannot just be stopped. It may not be at the same level, but we’re not in a system where institutions are just going to quietly enable this process. So I think there have to be some hard questions asked about what we understand the international-student program to be and what its objectives are.
If we want to tie it with immigration, are we looking for high-skilled workers, or are we looking for basic, low-skilled jobs that ought to be filled with international students? We’re using a program that is designed for international education to meet these needs. There’s this real lack of clarity about our own policy orientations.
Chaudhary: What role should the province play in shifting colleges and universities from their overreliance on this form of funding?
Trilokekar: I hope it’s an opportune time for a discussion about how the post-secondary education sector is funded and what our public sentiment is about the funding of these institutions. Personally, I’m skeptical we are going to see the kind of increase that is needed in terms of funding from the provincial government. We have come so far along. There are going to be hard times, I think, for the higher education sector.
Even our rationale for recruiting international students needs to be questioned. This might be a good time for a lot of these institutions to really ask the hard questions about why and how they’ve engaged in recruitment and support for international students. I wish and pray that we have this conversation and that, as a society, we push our provincial governments for the kind of funding that’s really required if we want to have a quality higher-education sector.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
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