New visa rules tackle international student housing

A suite of measures designed to ensure that more than 800,000 international students in Canada do not exacerbate its housing shortage and affordability crisis – and that students have sufficient funds to study without having to work full-time – has been announced by Marc Miller, the minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship.

Additionally, at the 7 December press conference Miller urged the provinces to crack down on what he called “the diploma equivalent of puppy mills that are just churning out diplomas” instead of offering a legitimate and full education.

Miller said: “International students contribute to campus life and Canada’s multicultural spirit in communities across the country and are drivers of innovation. When we welcome international students, we benefit from new ideas and ways of learning and researching coming into our post-secondary system.

“However, some of these students have experienced serious challenges navigating life in Canada.”

The housing crisis

From the public’s point of view, the most important parts of the minister’s announcement concern housing. Over the past year, Canada’s housing supply and affordability crisis has chipped away at the decades long support for high immigration numbers.

In 2022 Canada accepted almost one million immigrants. In November the country of 44 million people announced that over the next three years, it plans on accepting approximately 550,000 immigrants per year.

The lack of affordable housing, however, has led 67% percent of Canadians to oppose these targets, according to a poll conducted by Abacus Data, with 40% of people surveyed saying they are “way too high”.

International students are not immigrants, Miller emphasised more than once, and are not to blame for the housing crisis writ large. For example, over the last 10 years, the population of Ontario – the country’s largest province – has grown by almost two million people, from approximately 13.5 million in 2013 to 15.3 million in 2023.

During that time only 700,000 homes have been built. Lack of building of homes across the country has resulted in prices for new homes rising by 40% in the past five years and 6.3% in the past year alone. Nationwide, rents for two-bedroom apartments have risen by an average of 9.6% annually.

Professor Mike Moffat, who teaches business, economics and public policy at the Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario – and who briefed the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on this issue last summer – is careful not to blame international students for this problem.

“International students are the biggest victims of our inability to plan. They are not the ones causing the problem. They are among the ones having to suffer because of the problem. They are the ones who have to double and sometimes triple up,” Moffatt, told University World News last June.

However, he explains, international students whose universities do not provide housing for them – and none do – are forced to enter the local rental market, distorting it. London, Ontario, is home to both Moffat’s University of Western Ontario and Fanshawe College of Applied Arts and Technology. Together they have approximately 83,000 students.

In 2022 Fanshawe enrolled 26% more international students than it did the year before, making its total number of international students 6,500. The University of Western Ontario enrolled 4,759 international students. So together, the schools brought 11,259 international students into London, a city of just over 400,000.

“We’re seeing a lot of single-family homes getting converted into student rentals. Previously, as in most communities with colleges and universities, there were kinds of informal boundaries between where the students live and the townies,” Moffat explained.

“But now, the student area has been expanding out from many colleges by a block or two every year. So, the catchment area where students live is growing, particularly along bus lines. The effect cascades through the entire housing system. What’s happening on the student side is causing shortages on family sized homes because of those conversions into student rentals,” he added.

Do dollars make cents?

The reason for the large number of international students recruited by Canadian colleges and universities has less to do with altruism and seeking to foster “Canada’s multicultural spirit”, as the minister put it, and more to do with dollars and cents.

For example, in Ontario in the middle 2010s, rather than increase the per student grant from CA$10,000 (US$7,370), where it had been for years, the provincial government told the province’s 28 colleges of applied arts and technology to seek revenue elsewhere. This led the colleges to begin recruiting international students aggressively because international fees were and remain much higher than tuition charged to in-province students.

At Seneca Polytechnic (formerly Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology) in Toronto, international students pay CA$14,260 compared to the CA$3,571 tuition for Ontario students; 10,863 of the college’s 36,940 students are international students.

In the 2020 to 2021 academic year international students accounted for 68% of total tuition fees collected by Ontario’s colleges. At CA$1.7 billion (US$1.3 billion), it means international students contributed more to Ontario’s college system than did the government of Ontario, Canada’s richest province.

Colleges and universities across the country, essentially, view international students as ATMs. At the University of Calgary in Alberta, undergraduate tuition for this academic year for Canadians is CA$6,961, while for international students it is CA$26,849. At Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, tuition for Canadians is CA$8,983 while it is almost $CA10,000 higher for international students.

Universities and colleges on notice

In Canada, universities are the responsibility of the provincial governments. Accordingly, Miller did not announce any policies to help universities augment housing for international students. Student visas, however, are the responsibility of his ministry, which is why he put universities and colleges on notice.

“It is a mistake to invite them [international students] to come to Canada with no support including how to put a roof over their heads,” said Miller.

The federal government expects colleges and universities to accept only the number of students that they are able to provide with housing or assist with finding housing.

“We also want to ensure that international students don’t become victims of unscrupulous landlords who offer them inadequate living conditions, sometimes even at inflated prices,” said Miller.

In unusually blunt language, Miller said: “We are prepared to take the necessary measures, including significantly limiting visas to ensure that designated learning institutions provide adequate and sufficient student supports … to ensure international students are set up for success in Canada.

“Enough is enough. If provinces and territories cannot do this, we will do it for them. And they are not going to like the bluntness of the instruments that we use.”

A limit to work plus study

While Miller could not yet give a precise figure for the number of hours international students will be allowed to work off campus, he said that the COVID era 40 hour work week will end. Prior to COVID, international students were allowed to work off campus for a total of 20 hours outside their field of study.

Both because of labour shortages during COVID and because international students who remained in Canada during the summer, when many would have normally returned home, needed money for rent and food, the government changed the regulations and allowed them to work 40 hours a week.

Approximately 80% of international students who work off campus work more than 20 hours a week. “Forty hours a week is just not tenable. It is not credible that someone, except for rare instances, could work a full work week and actually study at the same time,” Miller said.

“I know, having done it myself. And I know lots of people that have worked very hard. But those 40 hour weeks drain you, and it is not reflective of a proper student experience,” he added. Miller will announce the final figure in a few weeks but indicated that it will be around 30 hours a week.

Raising the visa financial requirement bar

Concomitant with reducing the number of hours international students are allowed to work off campus is the decision to increase the financial requirement to attain a student visa. The financial requirement will rise from CA$10,000 – an amount set in the early 2000s – to CA$20,653.

This figure is 75% of the low-income cut-off, an amount set by Statistics Canada to distinguish low-income earners from other earners.

The government believes that CA$20,653 is “a more accurate cost of living level” and that international students will “arrive with the necessary resources to live and study in Canada. Future increases will be tied to the low-income cut-off Statistics Canada publishes every year”.

In response to a question about international students who fraudulently claimed to have had the CA$10,000, Miller admitted to frustration at the fact that “[t]here are people that play games and shift the money from bank accounts to build sort of the financial solvency requirements”.

He suggested that the new higher financial solvency requirement will help lessen the number of cases of fraud. “Obviously, if we’re raising the figure to CA$20,635, we want the person to be able to use it once they’re here,” he explained.

Blunt instrument warning

Miller called on the provinces to crack down on institutions which, although he did not name them, are all private for-profit colleges that he likened to “puppy mills” that issue diplomas without the requisite academic work being done.

Other ‘bad actors’ included the three Quebec-based private colleges that closed in early 2022. Together, M College in Montreal, CDE College and CCSQ College in Longueuil near Montreal, charged students between CA$10,000 and CA$15,000. When they went bankrupt, 633 students were out a total of CA$6.4 million, the PIE News reported last March.

The federal government’s tools, Miller warned, are blunt and, if used, could have unintended “ripple effects”. Weeding out the bad actors will require working with the provinces, which “have a number of tools at their disposal, namely the regulation of designated learning institutions that in some cases just need to be shut down”, he said.