Councillor calls out Ontario college after learning student lives with 13 people

A Waterloo Regional councillor says he will be sending a letter to Conestoga College’s president after speaking to a student who was living in a house with 13 other  people in a situation he described as “inhumane and down right unsafe.”

Kitchener councillor Michael Harris issued a series of tweets on Tuesday after he spoke with a student who was hauling a chair down the street.

He told Global News that he was collecting his mail from a community mailbox when he spotted the student.

“I saw down the street there was this guy carrying a chair down the street with a bunch of parcels or packages,” Harris said.

“He kind of stopped not too far from me and put the chair down to take a bit of a break and me being me, I went up to him and said, ”Hey, what’s going on here? What are you doing?’”

That began a conversation between the two, in which the Kitchener councillor was told that the man was from India and was studying at the nearby main campus of Conestoga College

“I kind of knew roughly whereabouts he was heading, offered to give him a hand and I just asked him, I said, ‘What’s your situation there?’” Harris explained. “How many people are you actually living with? And he told me 13.”

Harris said he was floored by that news although at the same time he noted that there has been a large influx of international students into his area of the city.

Conestoga College is the largest post-secondary institution in the country for international students and has expanded to add thousands of new students over the past few years.

“And it’s obvious the expansion and growth of international students across the college has led to this influx of students in the Doon area,” Harris said. “But I just felt that it … really sounded like an unsafe living situation.”

That led him to put out a series of posts on X on Tuesday night.

“I just thought it was time that I, I spoke up and I had to put that tweet out, just kind of telling people my experience that evening,” he explained.

He said the move to X brought on a massive response from the community.

In one case, he heard stories of people renting out driveways in Brampton so people could live in their cars.

Harris said that the recent mass influx of foreign students has begun to strain other areas for the region.

“Even from a regional perspective, the housing crisis that we’ve experienced in the last few years, a lack of housing, the cost of housing, but also the strain on regional services, transit, we know, is at record ridership levels,” he said.

“The strain from the food bank locally at this, past recent budget and I would say to you that stems back to the increase in the amount of international students at the at the college.

“I mean, you can’t … plug 10,000 students into a community and not feel the pressures of social services and even housing.”

It was a tough Tuesday for Conestoga College president John Tibbits, as some media outlets reported that he used some colourful language about another college president during an event.

Some have said Harris was piling on after the blowback began to Tibbits reportedly calling the other president a “whore” among other things but the Kitchener councillor said he was unaware of the other comments.

“I had no clue that was even happening, nor was I aware of any comments that he had made Tuesday afternoon,” Harris said. “I think I put my tweet out Tuesday evening.

The school’s board of directors released a statement on Thursday evening which said that they were reviewing Tibbits’ comments and that he had expressed his regret and apologized.

Harris, who is a graduate of and donor to Conestoga College, noted that the school needs to build more housing as it has fewer than 1,000 beds in Kitchener, Waterloo and Brantford.

“That residence that’s there was probably built early 2000s and there’s been nothing done since then,” he said. “You know, to accommodate more student residence units, especially on college-owned land, knowing that they are the benefactor of a significant amount of land.”

The school is currently working on new housing locations in Kitchener and Waterloo.

“I get that things take time to build. But when you know that you’ve got numbers coming through the door like they have, they need to have done better and they need to communicate frankly their plans to build more residential spaces if, in fact, they have them,” he said.

Global News reached out to Conestoga College to get a response to Harris’s posts but has yet to receive a response.

Conestoga has come under fire recently as the school has 30,000 international students with housing for less than 1,000.

Last month, Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced that the feds were set to install a two-year national cap on the intake of students which would see 364,000 approved study permits, down 35 per cent from 2023.

“In order to maintain a sustainable level of temporary residence in Canada, as well to ensure that there is no further growth in the number of international students in Canada for 2024, we are setting a national application intake cap for a period of two years for 2024,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller said when the move was announced.

That prompted Tibbits to issue a memo to staff earlier in February which called on the federal government to slow its move to curb the intake of international students into Canada.

“We agree that changes need to be made, especially in relation to private colleges, but the federal government’s decision should have been phased in over time and done in consultation,” the letter Tibbits issued on Friday said. “Instead, Canada’s reputation as a destination for post-secondary education is threatened.”

On Tuesday, the college touted the findings of a report which it had commissioned.

The report noted that Conestoga graduates add more than $6.2 billion annually to the province’s economy while more than 5,200 Conestoga graduates are local entrepreneurs.

It also noted that the college has spent $500 million over the last five years to expand campus locations and modernize buildings in the communities it serves.