Canada announced on Monday a two-year cap on international student visas to ease the pressure on housing, healthcare and other services at a time of record immigration.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller said there will be a 35 per cent reduction in new study visas in 2024. He said the country’s international students programme has been taken advantage of by fraudulent activity and it is putting pressure on housing and healthcare.
“It’s a bit of a mess and it’s time to reign it in,” Miller said.
The number of new visas handed out will be capped at 364,000. Nearly 560,000 such visas were issued last year.
The government said there are around 1 million foreign students in the country now and without any sort of intervention, this number would have continued to increase. The total number of foreign students is more than three times what it was a decade ago.
Miller said they have been working on stabilising the number of people entering the country yearly as housing pressures mount.
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The immigration minister said there are unscrupulous universities taking advantage of high tuition fees paid by foreign students without offering a solid education in return. In some cases, the universities are a way into Canada for students who can parlay their visas into permanent residencies.
“It is not the intention of this programme to have sham commerce degrees or business degrees that are sitting on top of a massage parlour that someone doesn’t even go to and then they come into the province and drive an Uber,” Miller said. “If you need a dedicated channel for Uber drivers in Canada, I can design that, but that isn’t the intention of the international student programme.”
Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre called it a mess and blamed Trudeau for granting study permits to tens of thousands of students who attend fake schools.