Ottawa finally acts on international student visas, setting a challenge for Doug Ford

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In Canada’s big-money foreign-student industry, bad schools were taking over from good ones.

Many universities had become dependent on the higher tuitions they charge foreign students, but in recent years the real growth was in colleges. Often private colleges.

Graduates of many public colleges can get a three-year work visa, a big step toward permanent-resident status. In Ontario, private colleges were allowed to license a public-college’s curriculum, and their students could get those work permits, too, while dozens of strip-mall colleges sold poor educations at high prices because they came with a student visa.

The number of foreign students grew to a million. Only about a third are in universities.

Now Immigration Minister Marc Miller has put the brakes on the growth by setting a cap on visas and tightening work-permit rules.

Finally, the federal government has recognized that its policies allowed an over-the-top boom in foreign students – and temporary workers, many of whom first arrived as foreign students.

This was a major policy failure that led to unusually rapid population growth that outstripped home-building, fuelling a housing crisis.

It’s hard to overstate how important Mr. Miller’s move is. Increasing home-building is the long-term solution to the housing crisis, but those policies won’t have a major impact for years. Reducing the growth in temporary residents can reduce the growth in demand relatively quickly – and send an immediate cooling signal to the housing market.

Now it will force some provinces to fix the mess they have made with lax regulation of postsecondary education – and, for the most part, that means Doug Ford’s Ontario.

The cap will affect B.C. and perhaps Nova Scotia, but will fall most heavily on Ontario. Ottawa issued roughly 600,000 new study permits in 2023, but Mr. Miller plans to cap the numbers at roughly 360,000 a year and divide the visas among the provinces based on population. Ontario is the centre of the foreign-student boom, accounting for more than 300,000 new study permits in 2023 – so its numbers will be slashed.

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Mr. Ford’s government has to decide which postsecondary institutions can bring foreign students in and which can’t. In fact, Ontario should have been doing that all along, but instead the province’s lax regulation of colleges made room for an exploitative industry.

“The actions of bad actors, whether they are provinces or institutions, are having an impact on the entire ecosystem,” said Philip Landon, the interim president of Universities Canada, the institutions’ lobby.

Foreign students are not the problem. They bring many benefits to Canada. Federal governments encouraged expansion: Stephen Harper’s Conservatives published a 2014 International Education Strategy that identified it as a trade opportunity.

The problem is that the numbers grew so big, so fast in recent years that they stretched housing capacity and services. The biggest growth was in selling crappy college programs as a means to immigration, at institutions that Mr. Miller likened to puppy mills.

Now that there’s a cap, universities in Ontario are worried that it will fall on them. They depend on foreign-student tuitions and some, like Queen’s University in Kingston, are facing dire financial trouble. Many universities haven’t seen their foreign student enrolments return to prepandemic levels, while numbers at private colleges have boomed. Mr. Landon’s members want the cap to fall on the “fly-by-night” colleges using programs as a “back door to immigration.”

One measure announced by Mr. Miller will almost certainly reduce the number of applications. New students at private colleges that license a public college curriculum will no longer be eligible for three-year work visas when they graduate. That will eliminate one of the big selling features for those colleges.

Still, Mr. Ford faces a challenge now. The days of unlimited student visas are numbered, so his government has to decide which schools will get them. Will they prioritize top-notch talent, or keep business going for a low-standard industry?

Of course, Ontario’s failing shouldn’t let the federal Liberals off the hook. They were asleep while the number of temporary residents ballooned. It took ages for the Liberals to even see that massive policy failure while the damaging consequences were piling up on so many ordinary folks.

Finally, albeit belatedly, Mr. Miller has acted. Over to you, Mr. Ford.