Imposing a cap on the intake of international students would be like doing “surgery with a hammer,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller told Global News on Friday, adding that a cap is not in the cards. However, he said he reserves the right to impose such a cap in the future.
It comes after Miller, Housing Minister Sean Fraser and Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc had indicated over the summer that Ottawa was considering a cap on student intake.
“We won’t be imposing a cap. I think we are looking at a little more surgical approach to a problem that has branched out into many areas of complexity, including fraud,” Miller told Global News in an interview.
“Doing surgery with a hammer, which is what a cap would have represented, was not a preference that I retained today.”
He added that the federal government would also be working with the provinces in the year to come. If those negotiations don’t go well, Ottawa could consider imposing a cap.
“I reserve the right to use it if things don’t go well over the next year, because it could be a tool ultimately that we have to use or use caps within the distinctions and categories of institutions that we see are perhaps behaving poorly,” he said.
“We’re really giving ourselves about a year to work with provinces to clean up their own act in their own jurisdiction.”
Miller was in Brampton, Ont. on Friday to announce changes to Canada’s international student program targeting fraud. Starting Dec. 1, post-secondary designated learning institutions will be required to confirm every applicant’s letter of acceptance directly with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
A new “enhanced verification process” is being put in place to prevent letter-of-acceptance fraud, a major concern after reports earlier this year of thousands of international students who say they received fraudulent letters.
The federal government is also preparing a “recognized institutions” framework, which will go into effect starting for the fall semester of 2024.
Institutions that set high standards for “services, support and outcomes” for international students will be given this designation by IRCC. Recognized institutions will receive benefits, such as priority processing of international student permits.
Miller told Global News that the criteria for recognized institutions will include providing mental health services as well as affordable housing for international students.
“We’re enhancing our letter of offer process to catch some of the worst cases of a fraud at the outset and putting in place a recognized institution model that will reward good actors for the client experience, the student experience that they have, making sure that they have housing,” he said.
Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC) welcomed the new enhanced verification system, but they said more measures were needed to protect migrant students who fall prey to fraud.
“This is a simple and much needed administrative measure, but questions remain about protection of students who will pay large amounts of money to education recruiters who have partnerships with colleges and universities, only to find their letters are not genuine when their study permits are rejected and have little to no recourse,” the group said in a statement on Friday.
According to Statistics Canada, the gulf between domestic and international fees is significant.
In the 2022-23 academic year, the average domestic student in Canada paid $6,834 in tuition. By contrast, the average international student paid nearly six times that amount at $36,123.
A Global Affairs Canada report said international students in Canada spend $22.3 billion on tuition, accommodation, and discretionary spending every year. This is in addition to international students being a major source of labour for Canada, which has faced a severe worker shortage in recent years.
Miller said he agrees with the premise that colleges and universities, who make tens of millions of dollars a year from international student tuition, should be doing more to house students.
“Clearly, the institutions that have a very lucrative business model, that has attracted international students, need to do their part. It’s part of the discussion today on the recognized institution framework,” he said.
In June, then-immigration minister Sean Fraser announced a task force that would look into cases of fraudulent admission letters. According to student rights’ activists, those facing deportation orders as a result of those letters came to Canada in 2017 and 2018 on student permits. Students protested against the deportations, until the task force was announced.
On Friday, Miller also provided an update on a joint IRCC-CBSA task force’s work. He said so far, the task force has found that 63 students were “genuine students.”
They will be given temporary permits to stay in Canada.
Last year, the restriction on international students working more than 20 hours a week was lifted.
As that deadline looms near in December, Miller said he had not yet come to a decision on whether the measure would be extended or made permanent.
“I am putting a lot of thought into it,” he told Global News.
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