On Monday last week, the Liberals got humiliated in a pair of by-elections in Quebec and Manitoba. In response, the Liberal party decided it needed to regain some popularity and that the best way of doing so was to kick universities and colleges a bit. And so the Minister of Immigration (and unofficial National Minister of Higher Education) Marc Miller announced a set of changes to study visas and post-graduation work visas.

(How do I know this was a sudden, unplanned event? Because on the day of the announcement, the minister was prepared to make precisely none of the details public….because they didn’t themselves know what the details were. The technical briefing isn’t until tomorrow—that is, seven days after the announcement—and full details still weeks away. Classic signs of a panic move.)

Anyways, the announcement had three big measures.

1) Graduate students are now officially included inside the student visa cap, whereas before they were outside it. 

2) The overall cap on student visas is being reduced by 10% and so, ipso facto, will every provincial cap. 

3) Post-graduate work visas are henceforth not open to college graduates unless their program is linked to a still-undefined area of high labour demand. In other words: we are still good with international students, but only so long as they contribute to depressing wage levels, which is pretty gross.

What does all this mean? Well, let’s start with the easy one, which is how it will all affect colleges. Easy because in no uncertain terms they are about to get absolutely hammered. Take away the work permit route to permanent residence and it’s not clear what the appeal of college education in Canada is. My guess would be that you will see numbers collapse by 80% or so. In Ontario, where international student fee income makes up slightly more than 50% of total institutional revenue, that would mean a drop in total income of over 40% (about $3.5 billion). About a third of that can be absorbed simply by bringing institutional surpluses down from an average of 13% to zero. And some of the rest will be costs that will disappear with lower student enrolments. But that still means a little over $2 billion in cuts, mainly in wages, which will ripple through every community in the province. And outside Ontario? Well, it won’t be as severe, but boy I know a whole bunch of very well-run colleges in western Canada (especially BC) where this is going to mean program closures on a mass scale. Just brutal.

How does it affect universities? Well, put it this way: since visa allocations are in the hands of provincial governments, it is going to depend on provincial governments being able to do the smart thing. In the medium-run, the three announcements should balance out ok for universities. The inclusion of graduate students in the cap and the 10% reduction in the cap is bad—particularly for graduate student recruitment—but the imminent massive exodus of international students from the college sector should free up a whole whack of spots for universities. However, this won’t happen automatically: each province has to re-allocate spots. It requires them to do something based on what is going to happen but has not yet happened. In other words, it requires governments to exercise judgement. My fear (in Ontario at least) is that the government, which demonstrably has an enormous amount of difficulty exercising any kind of higher cortical functions, simply keeps the current distribution of approvals constant (“because we just don’t know what is going to happen yet!”) and so the vast number of visa spots will go to colleges and be left unfilled.

(Note: a complicating factor here is that there are elections on in New Brunswick and British Columbia, and one will start in Saskatchewan in the next nine days. Since Ministries aren’t allowed to talk to stakeholders after writs have dropped, it’s going to take some time before governments can tell institutions what’s going to happen. Just more chaos and uncertainty.)

Now, of course, Justin Trudeau was at the ready to back up his Minister with some truly odious crocodile tears. “Immigration is great” he said, “We just want to punish bad actors.” This is ludicrous. The government is in no way, shape or form going after specific bad actors; it is going after the entire sector. Whether this is cruelty or stupidity I leave to readers to decide, but Trudeau’s explanation holds no water. The only possible justification for the approach the feds have taken here is that “it’s a national problem,” (it isn’t, but that’s another story) “but we have to let provinces find their own solution to the problem of bad actors.” This at least is a constitutionally correct attitude but it’s very different from Trudeau’s claim.

Could the federal government have come up with a set of criteria that defined bad actors and imposed it directly? Well, yes. It’s been trying to do something like that for well over a year now with its “trusted provider” scheme. This plan was always half-baked (as I explained back here). The problem is that the government wanted some kind of objective measure of “bad actors,” and so created a ludicrously complicated way to measure it. This was in part because they couldn’t properly describe what a “bad actor” was in the first place—they just thought they would know one when they saw one and assumed they could develop an algorithm that would nail precisely those people. The ravings of a federal government perpetually caught at the intersection of arrogance and ignorance.

But if the feds hadn’t been so intent on using the immigration system to indirectly regulate the post-secondary system, they would have realized that there was a much simpler, much more effective solution just staring them in the face. Forget “good” and “bad” actors; why not just regulate the proportion of international students at any given institution? You could just say, for instance, that universities and colleges could only get visas for up to, say 25% of the size of their previous year’s enrolment. Maybe with an additional rule that institutions could appeal the 25% limit and go up to 35% if they could make an argument in the national interest. The sort of argument that might allow U of T to recruit top global-talent graduate students, but Conestoga would have difficulty making for more one-year certificates in global business education. An approach like this would put the burden on actors who have decided that their business plans aren’t focused on domestic students. Which, to be frank, is something that most people inside and outside the sector could probably agree on. It would also give institutions a heck of a lot more clarity than they have now.

I am sure a little bit of dialogue and brainstorming could have got us to such an agreement and spared the sector as a whole a lot of heartache, while at the same time achieving the government’s overall goals on net migration. However, the feds don’t care because they needed to do something NOW, because rescuing a few extra Liberal seats in the face of the oncoming Conservative Tsunami is more important than the health of the post-secondary sector. 

It’s just such an utter, needless fiasco. And for everyone who has spent the last few decades talking about how great it would be if the feds were more involved in post-secondary education…how are you liking it so far?