Over the past few weeks, a weird idea has been emanating from Ottawa: a hard cap on student visa numbers.  This is a pretty foolish idea, as even a cursory examination of the issue will show.  It’s not entirely impossible – there is a narrow way to make it work – but I absolutely do not trust the present federal government to pull it off.

First, let’s start with why people think a cap on student visas is necessary.  As I mentioned a week ago, it’s housing.  There is a (mostly correct) view that uncontrolled growth in student visa numbers – nearly all at public institutions (with the actual teaching often out-sourced to a private college) – coupled with a decades-long national failure to increase the housing supply has created a sharp uptick in the price of rental housing.  This not only affects international students, who often find themselves living in deeply substandard housing as a result, but all renters.  The simple idea at work here is that a cap on visas means a reduction in the influx of renters and therefore price relief on housing.

Now there is an obvious trade-off here: the financial health of institutions versus rental prices in urban Canada.  The trick, in theory, is to set a cap low enough to choke off rent increases but high enough not to push institutions into financial crisis.  But no one knows what that number is.  It’s all guesswork. That’s not a strong argument against a cap, but it suggests that the act of picking a number is more fraught than the breezier ends of journalistic commentary would have you believe.

But the harder problem starts when you get to the question of rationing.  Once you set a cap, it means there needs to be a way of distributing study opportunities within that cap.  And it is here – actual contact with the realities of a cap – where things fall apart quickly.

Say a first-come, first served rationing mechanism is used.  This is effectively what we have now, since Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has basically refused to hire an adequate workforce to deal with the rise in student visa applications.  This sparked a lot of the financial chaos in universities last year: IRCC could not process visas quickly enough, and so for a significant number of applicants Labour Day came and went without an approval, meaning that at some universities there was a significant drop of newly-arriving international students. 

But think about what first-come first-served means under a cap system.  Depending on where IIRC puts the start date on the year, institutions will undoubtedly move their intake dates to the start of the process.  An August or September start date to an annual cap system would be most convenient for universities; but a January date would probably prompt a lot of colleges move their main intake date to the start of the calendar year, to scarf up all the available places.  First-come, first-served is very much a gameable metric.

The alternatives being bandied about in Ottawa are quite different.  They include not discriminating between students, but about discriminating between the institutions they attend.  Understanding this approach means getting into the weeds a bit: at present, any institution that wishes to attract international students must become a “Designated Learning Institute” or DLI.  Crucially, DLI status is bestowed by provincialgovernments because of s.93 of the Constitution.  Requirements to obtain DLI status vary a bit by province, but it’s basically a “can-you-fog-a-mirror” test: any institution which is more than three years old and hasn’t created any problems for provincial authorities can likely get one.  Most of the people who want to cap visas are effectively suggesting that we punt s.93 into the long grass and get the federal government to create a new classification system that allows it to discriminate between “good” and “bad” institutions and make sure we only let in students from the “good” type. It seems to be mostly assumed that “bad” = “private”, but it’s not clear to me how well Ottawa understands how fuzzy the line between the two is in the case of PPP colleges. 

This approach falls apart under light scrutiny.  The federal government’s ability to discriminate between provincially nominated institutions in an area of clear provincial jurisdiction is, well, let’s just say “unclear” (“non-existent” might also work).  And even if that weren’t the case, what possible objective criteria could the government use to distinguish “good” from “bad” institutions?  Why on earth would anyone trust IRCC, of all organizations, to do this? 

There is another, no-cap version of this idea floating around, in which the “good” institutions can access faster visa processing.  I’m pretty sure this version came from somewhere in the university sector.  At an operational level, this has all the faults listed in the previous paragraph but none of the upside of a cap.

Another version of this idea involves discriminating between institutions based on their ability to provide housing for their international students, or students in general.  This idea is several dozen cards short of a full deck.  For the most part, our system works off the Scottish urban university model, not the Oxbridge college/residential model, and it always has done.  The lack of housing at Canadian universities and colleges is a feature, not a bug.  A substantial number of community colleges have no residences at all (having never been given money by their provincial governments to build any), so a cap on this basis would have disastrous consequences for some institutions.  And even if, by some chance, the judgement on housing adequacy was based on plans for new housing rather than existing housing stock, which in theory would give institutions some time to adjust, why would anyone think the Immigration Ministry had the competency to judge good from bad, real from fantasy?

What it comes down to is this: the feds planning this scheme are, and I mean this quite literally, clueless when it comes to dealing with, evaluating, or judging post-secondary institutions.  If a cap is needed, then the feds need to obtain some level of provincial consent and buy-in to work out rationing mechanisms.  Heck, you could even hand it all over to the provinces: tell each one of them what their cap is and then let each one work out the rationing mechanism.  This would create another set of problems (on what basis do you set a per-province cap?) but might also solve another one (are caps needed at all outside Ontario, British Columbia, and Nova Scotia, given that these provinces are where the housing scarcity problem is most acute).

I understand that working with provinces is difficult: doubly so when both feds and provinces seem to almost entirely forgotten how to make federalism work in the past seventeen years.  So, there remains another possibility, if the feds absolutely insist on doing it alone on this file.  Instead of capping places, why not try to suppress demand for places at Canadian institutions?  For instance, they could raise student application visa fees, or make it harder for future international students to work while here (current international students would still have their work permits honoured). These are measures that will reduce demand without discriminating between institutions in an unwieldy and possibly unconstitutional way.

These options are extremely unlikely, I think, because after nearly fifteen years of tacking a pathway to citizenship onto student visas, official Ottawa has difficulty fathoming the idea that their function might be to hit the brakes rather than the accelerator.  But it is feasible, can be done relatively quickly, and does not require provincial participation.

In any event, after 15 years, that postsecondary-to-permanent-residency policy might need review anyway.  Quite a lot of good has come from it, but clearly the cost-benefit equation has changed over time.  If we can get everyone to stop thinking in panic/crisis terms, where silly ideas get floated because of the urgency of now, maybe we can have that review.