Immigration minister to meet with N.S. officials over cap on international students

Federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller recently announced a two-year cap on how many international students will be granted study permits to come to Canada.

The change is being introduced to address the affordable housing crisis, but it's also an effort to crack down on private colleges that mislead international students about their chances of staying in Canada once they finish their diploma.

Miller spoke to CBC Radio's Information Morning Nova Scotia host Portia Clark about the reasons for the change and the possible effects it may have on international students and institutions in the province.

Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Information Morning - NS8:12Immigration minister on international student cap and how it could affect N.S.

Immigration Minister Marc Miller speaks with Portia Clark about the two-year study permit cap on international students his government has just imposed.

What is your sense of the extent to which international students are contributing to the housing crisis?

You probably read a number of economists saying that the number of people here on a temporary basis, including a large swath of international students that has spiked rapidly in a couple of years, have created an impact on the cost of shelter, which includes rentals and home ownership.

The international student increase has occurred notably in British Columbia and in Ontario but recently in ... P.E.I., Nova Scotia and New Brunswick which were on an untenable trajectory as well.

We were looking at a spike of from one million international students on three-year permits for the last three years to 1.4 million next year which, if that continues, could present some real challenges in housing and perhaps even folks that would be claiming asylum at the end.

What's your understanding of where provinces and territories are right now in deciding how they're going to distribute this among the various institutions?

I think privately there has been some hesitation as to how to do this. This is something that is disruptive to a system that was out of control.

Provinces will have to move quite quickly to make sure that, you know, they look at the institutions under their control and regulate them accordingly.

And the best way to regulate them is to look at them and say, well, are you an institution that is deserving of getting these students from abroad or do you have to get your funding elsewhere or perhaps shut down?

There have been public reports across the country on some institutions that really haven't been doing their jobs and creating a proper student experience, that's proper education, proper housing, proper health services, including mental health.

That's something that really needs to be done. They have a very short period of time to get themselves in order or shut down some institutions that really shouldn't exist in this country.

When you say quite quickly and they need to do this in quick order, does that mean by the next school year in the fall?

This is not something that's going to be fixed overnight. It'll probably take a couple years to really bring the system back to what it was intended to be in the first place.

This is the first step. I don't exclude further measures, but it was the first important step to really bringing in something that was creating an ecosystem that had people chasing short-term gain without looking at what the long-term pain was.

What have you heard from universities that rely heavily on international students? For example, Cape Breton University reported about 77 per cent of the students there come from overseas.

There is a recognition among those institutions that have been behaving well that this was a long time coming.

There are others that are hiding and there are others that are finding a lot of excuses to find all sorts of evils in what I announced.

The reality is that the Government of Canada did have to act and those institutions that need to get their ships in order need to look elsewhere than the exploitation and perhaps even abuse of an international visa program that was never intended to fill their coffers on the backs of international students at the proportions that they are doing.

International students are not to blame for this, and some of them are being scapegoated as a result of this, and that's not fair for them.

Will you be watching how each province, in our case Nova Scotia, brings this in?

I am meeting my colleagues in Nova Scotia in the next week or so looking for some positive discussions.

I wouldn't say Nova Scotia was an outlier in terms of the volume, but it certainly was on a trajectory that was putting it very close to Ontario if it continued in the next few years.

So there will be some adjustments that need to be made.

We haven't really finalized the numbers of the reductions yet. That's a discussion that will be concluded within the next few days.

MORE TOP STORIES