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Montreal’s McGill University in October, 2023. In 2023, for example, students could arrive in Canada and start studying at one school, and then switch to another school without having to apply for a new study permit.Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press
Canadian residency was available for purchase just a few short years ago. Everyone involved knew what was going on – the colleges, the universities, the immigration “consultants,” the provinces and federal government, and prospective new Canadians. They all recognized that if an individual checked the appropriate boxes, made the correct attestations and could muster up tuition for one of the hundreds of Designated Learning Institutions (DLI) in Canada, he or she could probably stay in Canada for the long-term. In 2024, 98 per cent of those who applied for postgraduate work permits (PGWP) were approved.
There was plenty of flexibility in this plan. In 2023, for example, students could arrive in Canada and start studying at one school, and then switch to another school without having to apply for a new study permit. There was no cap on how many hours they could work while living in Canada on a student visa, which meant that foreign students were effectively temporary foreign workers, but on a different visa. And virtually anyone who had completed an eight-month-long program at a DLI was eligible for a PGWP, regardless of which field of study they completed and whether they could demonstrate basic proficiency in English or French.
It was a great way for colleges to make money, for consultants to get rich, for provinces to beef up their low-wage work force and for investors to purchase properties and cram them with international students, who would then pay down their mortgages. But the free-for-all (or, to put it more accurately, the fee-for-access) couldn’t last, so eventually, the government had to clamp down on the rules. It turns out that selling access to Canadian residency comes with all sorts of unintended economic and social costs – as well as political ones.
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But the new rules have angered foreign students who are already in Canada, and understandably so. Last week, a group gathered to protest changes implemented by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), which they say have made it harder for them to access postgraduate work permits. (For example, the IRCC introduced field-of-study requirements in 2024 that render international students eligible for PGWPs only if they have completed programs that align with Canada’s “long-term labour market needs”). In Montreal, students are protesting the sudden closure of the Collège supérieur de Montreal after the Quebec government declined to renew its permit. Many international students are now in limbo, worried about their ability to stay in Canada now for study, and later, for work. Some say they have nothing to return to in their home countries, since they sold everything to pay for tuition in Canada.
To be clear, as devastating as the situation might be to these international students, Canada doesn’t actually owe them anything. Those who applied to come to Canada to study were guaranteed only that – the ability to come to this country to learn – and the expectation is that they will return to their home countries when they have finished their studies. Indeed, an expressed condition of a study permit is that the recipient leaves Canada upon completion of his or her studies, and border officers can deny admission if they are not reasonably satisfied that the prospective student maintains an intention to do so. There is no guarantee of a PGWP, even though it was practically a sure thing just a couple of years ago.
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None of this is fair in the very colloquial sense of the word. The Canadian government was explicitly marketing student visas as a path to permanent residency by inviting foreigners to “study, work and stay in Canada,” and prospective students responded in droves. In 2023/2024, there were 428,077 student visa-holders in Canada, which was up nearly 50 per cent from just before the pandemic. And the reason why that number exploded was not because people from Punjab were suddenly ecstatic about the opportunity to learn hairdressing at the Eikonic Academy in Mississauga, Ont., but because everyone knew it was an easy way to start a new life in Canada. You could even work as much as you wanted while you ostensibly studied for a degree to take back home.
The Canadian government cannot and should not do anything now to placate the international students protesting for PGWP access, even though Ottawa played a major role in setting their expectations in the first place. Canadian residency cannot be for sale, even if the Canadian government dangled the prospect just a few years ago. This is an unfortunate outcome for those who risked everything to start a new life in Canada, but the process was always that: a risk.
