Canada Immigration Minister Marc Miller is meeting with officials in Nova Scotia to discuss the two-year cap imposed on study permits.
The cap – which was introduced last month and limits international student numbers in 2024 to just 360,000 – has become the source of heated debate.
According to Miller, who gave an interview to CBC Radio’s Information Morning Nova Scotia host Portia Clark, it was introduced as a means of tackling the affordable housing crisis and cracking down on private colleges that mislead and exploit international students about their chances of staying in the country after graduating.
“The international student increase has occurred notably in British Columbia and in Ontario but recently in … P.E.I., Nova Scotia and New Brunswick which were on an untenable trajectory as well,” said Miller.
“We were looking at a spike of from one million international students on three-year permits for the last three years to 1.4 million next year which, if that continues, could present some real challenges in housing and perhaps even folks that would be claiming asylum at the end.”
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Miller said that provinces will have to act swiftly to ensure that they look at which academic institutions fall under them to regulate them in terms of international student admissions.
This is a means of restoring the “integrity” of the Canada international student program, as was declared when the news regarding the caps was first released.
According to IRCC, some institutions have significantly increased their international student intakes to boost their revenues, causing more students to come to Canada without the requisite support.
Miller said in the interview that “there is a recognition among those institutions that have been behaving well that this was a long time coming.”
“There are others that are hiding and there are others that are finding a lot of excuses to find all sorts of evils in what I announced.”
He did say, however, that international students are not to be blamed for this, and there needs to be a check in place to ensure the actors who are actually in the wrong are punished.
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Nova Scotia, according to him, was not an outlier in terms of the volume, but was on a trajectory that would eventually lead it to reach numbers that Ontario already sits at.
IRCC has not finalized its numbers yet but will do so in the next few days.