It’s that time of year when university and college students are heading back to school, but this year an important crop of students won’t be, raising some concerns in Manitoba.
In January, Canada’s minister of immigration, Marc Miller, announced that the federal government would be granting fewer applications for study permits to international students.
“To ensure that there is no further growth in the number of international students in Canada for 2024, we are setting a national intake application cap for two years,” Miller said.
Now the impact of that announcement has been highlighted at the University of Manitoba, where there will be 500 fewer first-year international students this semester.
Its president, Michael Benarroch, says that lower enrolment is taking a big bite out of the university’s bottom line.
“International students pay considerably higher tuition than domestic students,” he said. “If we’re seeing about a seven per cent decrease overall this year, we’re talking about a $7- to $8-million hit to our budget.”
The long-term consequences could hit even harder.
“If this trend continues, we will see, over time, a reduction of 1,500 to 2,000 international students. That’s going to have a big impact on this institution,” Benarroch said.
It’s a punch other sectors will be absorbing too.
“It’s going to have a negative impact. I mean, there’s no question about that,” said Chuck Davidson, president of the Manitoba Chamber of Commerce.
He said the workforce — which is already struggling — is just one more of the policy’s victims.
“When businesses have less people to continue to do work, what kind of impact does that have? Either typically means that, you know, they’re going to reduce hours or others are going to have to do more,” he said.
“This is going to have (an impact), not just on post-secondary, but on the business community as a whole.”
The federal policy came as a result of housing crises in the country. But the City of Winnipeg said international students aren’t the main issue when it comes to hard-to-find homes.
In an emailed statement, it said the rental market is already tight in the city, with a 1.8 per cent vacancy rate. It said the demand is rooted in permanent immigration and young people starting families.
“The international student cap would, at most, add some slack,” the city said, but “overall (they) make up a small proportion of our overall demand for housing.”
Coun. Janice Lukes says Winnipeg got the short end of a botched one-size-fits-all federal policy.
“I think we’re kind of caught up in it all in that the real pressure is on East. It’s probably in Vancouver too,” she said, noting that Winnipeg has plenty of housing for international students.
“We’ve got a lot of stock. We’ve got more coming on board,” she said, referencing new builds going up in the city.
In its initial announcement, the federal government did say it created individual provincial and territorial caps based on population. But Lukes and Davidson would like to see the policy re-evaluated for individual communities and institutions.
“Any time government is taking a blunt instrument to making policy changes, what we would suggest is that there be a review period as well, in terms of what are the bigger impacts,” Davidson said.
“Take a scalpel and make some smaller additions that are not going to negatively impact post-secondary (institutions) across the country and communities … when they’re not necessarily where the problem has been,” he added.
For the University of Manitoba, those conversations cannot come soon enough.
“We’re going to have to find a way to correct this so that it doesn’t impact the whole system,” said Benarroch, who fears the move has already made a long-term impact.
“We had applications of students who then decided not to pay their deposits because they felt that … Canada was now not their first choice,” he said. “There’s too much uncertainty for them. And they’re just not sure that they will be welcomed here, that they’ll be able to continue to study here. And there’s lots of competition.”
In an emailed statement, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada says it will re-assess how many international students it accepts in 2025 at the end of this year.