International Students Inquiry: Recognizing the contributions of international students in Canada and the challenges that many of them face

On June 4, 2024 Senator Omidvar spoke to her inquiry on international studies that examined the contributions of international students in Canada and the various challenges, such as fraud and physical, emotional, and sometimes sexual abuse, that many of them face:

Hon. Ratna Omidvar rose pursuant to notice of November 28, 2023:

That she will call the attention of the Senate to the contributions of international students in Canada and the various challenges, such as fraud and physical, emotional, and sometimes sexual abuse, that many of them face.

She said: Honourable senators, I seem to often draw the short straw, always standing between you and your dinner, but I promise once again to whet your appetite with information and ideas before you get on to your well-earned rest.

This is an inquiry about international students in Canada. It is a story about people, about their hopes and dreams, their aspirations, but it is also a story about money and greed. It is a story about severe unintended consequences and disappointment. When I think about it, it has all elements of “the good, the bad and the ugly” wrapped up in it.

I don’t want to start on a positive note. I’m going to start with the bad, which started to come to light in 2021 through media stories that were documenting the abuse of international students, for example — and we read about it in Maclean’s and the CBC and the Toronto Star — about eight students crammed into one apartment where even the corridor to the apartment was rentable space, about harassment by landlords, about disappointed students who realized that they had been sold a false basket of goods and about the truly ugly side of it, which was trafficking and even suicides.

Senator Woo, former senator Marwah, Senator Yussuff and myself pooled our concerns and our resources to investigate these further. Last fall, almost exactly on the date when the international student bubble burst, we made our report and recommendations public.

I have waited to speak to this for almost a year because so many changes have been announced, and any thoughtful discussion on international students must take these changes into account.

But it is important to go back to the basics, and the basics are pretty straightforward for me. Canada aims to provide a world-class education to students, both domestic and international. If some international students stay, then that’s terrific for Canada. If some international students choose to leave, that’s also terrific for Canada because they become ambassadors for our country.

Somewhere along this way, however, we lost our way. As a result, our world-class universities and colleges, which we rely on to provide education to our children — my grandchildren now — domestic students in the first line, have become overreliant on an external source of funding over which they have no control, namely, fees derived from international students. In other words, at stake is not only the treatment of international students but also the future of Canadian children and, in fact, the future of our country.

How did this happen? I’m going to take you back to 2011. At that time, we lagged behind the U.K., the U.S. and Australia in attracting international students. It became an aspiration of our country to catch up, so we launched the International Education Strategy to enhance Canada’s global competitiveness. Our goal was to double the number of international students, from 240,000 in 2011 to over 450,000 by 2022. In fact, we surpassed this target by 2017 and significantly exceeded it by 2022. Success we could claim. Canada now hosts close to 1 million international students, who contribute over $22 billion to our economy and support more than 218,000 jobs, revitalizing, in particular, smaller communities. That is the good part of the story.

In the best scenario, international students contribute to the financial base of our system. They fill labour market needs. They transition to permanent residence and then become citizens. In 2022, 95,000 international students became permanent residents, a significant rise from 19,000 in 2015.

My nephew pursued this path. He came to study at the University of Toronto and did an undergrad in business. He graduated, found a job at HSBC, transitioned to CIBC, and somewhere along the line he became a permanent resident and has now put in an application for citizenship.

What more could a country want? Students like my nephew, who have worked here, who speak one of our official languages, whose credentials are accepted are the literal low-hanging fruit for us. However, success has its costs. There are now integrity challenges, housing challenges, unmet expectations and reports of unhealthy relationships between public and private colleges, which appear to be a sham and a scam.

At the core of these challenges is a human being. It’s the student. Many live in overcrowded conditions, face landlord abuse and struggle with false promises of work opportunities and permanent residency. Despite these challenges, most want to stay.

I live in a part of Toronto, and I love taking the subway because it brings me face to face with people. At a certain subway stop, a huge crowd of international students gets in. They look like me. They’re clearly from India. Because I speak their language, I engage with them. I say to them, “Are you here to study and to stay? Have you heard about the new rules?” And they say to me, “We’ve heard about them. We’re worried about them. But under no condition can we leave, because it would be such a loss of face for us and for our families.”

We’ve gotten into this mess. I think it’s normal when we get into a mess that we look over our shoulder and find someone to blame, but I think this is, frankly, unproductive. Everyone shares in this mess: the federal government; the provincial government; territorial governments; educational consultants; international students themselves, because some of them use it as a backdoor entry; landlords; employers; and, of course, our designated learning institutions, colleges and universities.

At the heart of this is one inescapable truth, and it is this: We have collectively and deliberately beggared our colleges and universities, and the numbers bear me out. Provincial funding for post-secondary educational institutions has plummeted from 28.2% to 21.5% in 11 years. At the national level, funding for post-secondary educational institutions has remained stagnant for the last 15 years.

Provincial governments have either frozen domestic student fees or been extremely stingy with transfers to educational institutions. In Ontario, it is particularly bad. Provincial funding per full-time domestic public college student was the lowest in 2018-19. In order to make up for this lost revenue — on the one hand, they’ve frozen domestic fees, and on the other hand, they’re cutting back on grants; I can’t actually blame colleges and universities for looking for a source of revenue — they reach for international students, and international students are being used as their ATM.

Another proof point is the widening fee gap between domestic fees, which are frozen, and international fees, which can go up as the institute or province decrees. International student fees now constitute, in my province, 69% of the base of funding for universities and colleges. If this is not dependency, I don’t quite know what is.

Whilst I understand that post-secondary institutions have had to rely increasingly on foreign student fees to cover their base, our report takes issue with the focus on revenue over quality education. Partnerships between public and private career colleges are used as a revenue-generating tactic, very often compromising quality.

It works like this: A non-urban college or university in a part of Canada where it is difficult to attract international foreign students — who are the only source of revenue that universities and colleges can grab — will partner with a private college in a place like Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal and share the revenue with them. The student never goes to the host college and stays in an urban centre. They are promised that through this partnership, they will be able to work and gain permanent residency. The problem is that these arrangements surpass enrollment limits and lack compliance and quality assurance audits.

I was in Chandigarh last year, which is in the Punjab region. It has the single largest visa-producing facility for applicants coming to Canada in all the world. I visited the consulate general to examine this phenomenon. Early one morning, there was a snaking line of people waiting around the plaza where our consulate is located. I spoke to these people. Again, because I look like them and speak their language, they opened up to me. All of them said they wanted to come to Canada and to stay in Canada. They were not really clear about what they were going to study or what colleges they were applying to. But they were clear that they were going to use all their resources — and possibly their families’ — to get here.

It was also very clear to me that they were being advised by educational consultants. The city was filled with advertisements stating, “I will help you come to Canada. I will help you pass your exam. I will help you get your visa,” et cetera. Everybody I spoke to used a consultant. To some extent, it is a matter of culture. As a matter of culture, the people in the Punjab region — and I am one of them so I can state this — tend to use consultants. It is hard to beat culture.

Consultants provide some bona fide services to the students, such as prepping for ESL tests or obtaining a letter of admission, et cetera. They are compensated. They charge almost no fees to the student — and this should be a giveaway. Instead, they are paid on a commission basis by Canadian colleges and universities. Sometimes these commissions are as high as 15% to 30%. This is a very sweet deal all around. The Canadian post-secondary institutions can attract students from arm’s length, and the consultants get a pretty sweet commission. However, it is not such a sweet deal for the international student, who is often referred by the consultant to a course of study or institution that is not made out to be what it is.

A CBC article from March highlighted a particular case where an Indian student was misled by an agent who enrolled them in a private college and falsely assured them of an easy transfer to a public institution. This situation reveals significant ethical issues. There is minimal incentive and insufficient oversight by Canadian governments to ensure that this kind of fraud is not perpetrated. There are also “ghost consultants” who pose as immigration consultants and claim to provide services but charge fees for absolutely nothing.

The entry of private colleges into this mix is problematic. I want to be careful here because private colleges have called me and some have told me that they do provide bona fide services, but not all do. They don’t receive public funding and operate privately, leading to minimal oversight of class sizes, educational quality and financial stability. A January 2023 article in Maclean’s highlighted issues with a Quebec-based private college that closed suddenly in 2022, leaving international students in a difficult situation.

Since we made our report public, certain corrective measures have been taken. Global Affairs Canada has sought input for a new international education strategy, including better regulation of educational agents. This might offer us clues for going forward.

We must get back to the basics. We must stop overpromising international students that they can come, work and stay. Check the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, or IRCC, website. It says, “Come to Canada. Learn, work, stay.” That is a false promise we should not be making. We should be tabling numbers every year with our annual immigration plan as to how many international students we plan to land, just as we put out a plan for grandparents, et cetera.

There are many other things that we can do, but we must address the root problem by providing predictable, sustained funding for Canadian colleges and universities so they are able to provide a quality education, in the first line to domestic students. The reliance on international fees for financial stability is risky.

Look at the political situation between India and Canada. I can project quite confidently that the number of students from India will fall, and India makes up 40% of the international student cohort. What will universities and colleges do?

We must have a serious, grown-up, national conversation about restoring financial stability to the post-secondary education system. It is not a conversation about power, control, credit or blame. It is about the future of our country. If we don’t do this and lose sight of the fundamentals, we will shortchange our entire future.

So, colleagues, I leave you with this thought: Our study started out by focusing on international students, but I have come to the conclusion that international students are merely a symptom of a severe root cause. If we don’t address the root cause, I can promise you that the tail will wag the dog. Thank you.