Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Nov. 18th, 2024

[Prof. Christopher Worswick]

Coming out of the COVID pandemic, we knew the health care system was severely constrained. Then we brought in a million or two million new people, and very few of them were able to work in the health care system, so it's hard to see how the health care system was going to expand. Cutting these numbers back makes sense.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you very much.

Before I go to the next round, I would appreciate it if, before you start questioning, you could mention who the question is for, because the two witnesses online can't see our facial expressions. I'd appreciate that.

With that, we'll go to Mr. Brunelle-Duceppe for six minutes.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I'd also like to thank all the witnesses who are with us today.

My first question is for Mr. Colleret.

Mr. Colleret, as you said, having international students at your establishments comes with its share of challenges. On that note, you tell us that the universities in the Université du Québec network are assuming their responsibilities.

Can you give us some examples of measures you are putting in place in this regard?

[Maxime Colleret]

Thank you for the question.

I think everyone is aware of the growing number of international students. At the Université du Québec, our numbers have gone up significantly, but we haven't left it unchecked. It does bring a host of challenges, though. I'm thinking in particular of agencies that send out mass applications for admission. For example, we received 99,000 applications for admission in 2023, a 269% increase over 2018. Obviously, not all of those applications were accepted. At the Université du Québec en Outaouais, 4,000 applications were submitted in 2024, but 431 applications were deemed eligible and 355 students registered. It's important to note that we're currently addressing a number of factors and that we're assuming our responsibilities.

Recently, asylum claims have been getting some media coverage. A question was asked about it earlier. As universities, we assess university records. Assessing the risk a candidate poses is more the responsibility of the Quebec and federal governments.

We nevertheless try to make sure that the students attending our establishments have a serious study plan and that they're really coming here to study. A number of establishments now require a deposit with admission applications. In other words, a deposit is required while applications are being assessed, but it is then reimbursed. This stops the agencies and ensures that the candidates who are accepted have a serious study plan.

We have now a massive guide at the university, an encyclopedia of all institutions around the world and the programs they offer. We also have a computerized decision support system, which helps us ensure that the people we accept are genuine graduates and really have the education they say they have.

Unlike some individuals who are mainly outside Quebec, the Université du Québec does not use immigration as a business model. On the contrary, we want to make sure that candidates are serious about doing their studies here, and we're taking the necessary steps to do so. Things are obviously not perfect yet, but we're working on it.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

In your opening remarks, you talked about Canada-wide measures. Last week, the committee realized that the department in Ottawa perhaps didn't have a solid grasp of Quebec's education system, which does things differently than the rest of Canada.

Take, for example, the measure on post-graduation work permits. Does this measure affect you?

Isn't there a disconnect, in that a measure is enforced Canada-wide, but there might be a lack of familiarity with the Quebec system, especially the university system in your case?

[Maxime Colleret]

Yes, Quebec's system is unique, since universities fall under the Ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur. When it comes to the post-graduation work permit, as we understand it, bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees would be exempt from this measure. However, all short-duration programs, including those leading to Quebec's specialized postgraduate diplomas, or DESS, which are offered in most, if not all, universities in Quebec, will be subject to this measure.

Obviously, we expect that this could have an impact in the long term on enrolment in these programs. However, universities develop programs over five, 10 or 15 years, and these programs can't be changed overnight. Some Université du Québec institutions are working with the Government of Quebec to create DESS programs that will address certain shortages. I'm thinking in particular of the DESS in education, which aims to address the shortage of teachers in the Quebec education system, and the DESS in administration, which aims to address the current labour shortage.

Université du Québec's 10 universities are rooted in their communities. These institutions are located not only in Montreal, but throughout the regions. Most of the time, they develop their programs in tandem with the communities, with the very needs of those communities in mind.

A Canada-wide measure is ill-suited to take into account the realities of those communities and the institutions rooted in them. For example, if a sector is needed in a given community but isn't on the federal government's list of priority sectors, that can mean that a program won't be offered. In the regions, the cohorts are sometimes relatively small, and the absence of international students in these programs can literally mean that the cohort won't start up.

In that context, even Quebec students wouldn't have access to those programs. It's a specific measure, and it's very difficult to adapt it to the realities of each region, particularly in Quebec.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Is my time already up, Mr. Chair?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Ask a short question.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

I'll try to come back to you later, Mr. Colleret. This has been a great discussion.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you.

We will now go to MP Kwan. After MP Kwan, we will give two minutes to the Conservatives, two minutes to the Liberals, one minute to the Bloc and one minute to the NDP. Then that's it.

MP Kwan, please go ahead.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for appearing before our committee today.

My question is for Professor Emery.

In a podcast that came out around November 7, I think, you and your co-hosts made comments about the decision the government announced with respect to the immigration levels plan and the changes regarding international students. They were somewhere along the lines that they were more of a political response and that the government was doing things that are politically expedient in the short run to take the heat off of the current government.

I wonder if you could expand on that comment with respect to the decision on the changes regarding international students.

[Prof. Herb Emery]

Sure.

The challenge is.... Again, I should have been a bit more careful about inferring motive on the part of government. However, I will say that the lack of study and discussion prior, the speed with which those caps came in on the heels of crises like affordable housing and things like that, perception of bad actors in Ontario, growing intense pressure on Ontario universities and colleges for finances, the fact that it happened so quickly without study and without this kind of consultation prior.... To me, it seems as if there's been more discussion after about what the impacts have been. That was behind a lot of those comments.

It's also the case in the maritime region. A lot of the discussion around immigration numbers and the role of international students.... It wasn't being studied in terms of absorptive capacity or some of those factors like Professor Worswick has brought up. It was really just “We need more numbers.” This goes back to 2016 when the idea of just growing international students, immigration numbers in total, was also a politically expedient way to try to grow the regional economy, because there was no clear evidence that it was going to work in a small open economy. You need to stimulate labour demand to get population up; you can't push it by increasing labour supply.

We've had a period of at least 10 years where governments tend to study things after they make the policy decision instead of in advance. That's part of why I believe that a lot of these things are reactionary and that they tend to be changes made when things don't go as expected.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you very much. I really appreciate those comments.

This has been said already by others. They seem to indicate that the government's decision was, in fact, a political response to the housing crisis, which, by the way, was not necessarily caused by newcomers but by successive Liberal and Conservative governments that failed on the delivery of housing that people need. I won't expand on that now. I'll save that for another day.

People are also saying that they fear there will be unanticipated consequences as a result of these decisions and the announcement that the government has made. You touched on this in your podcast, saying, “We're about to see a lot of dominoes fall, like the financial crisis about to hit a lot of the Ontario post-secondary system, and this is going to have knock-on effects because firms aren't going to find workers, so we'll see plants starting to close or threatening to close.”

I wonder if you can share with the committee your thoughts on the broad economic impacts of the international student caps for different provinces and different regions, particularly rural regions or smaller communities.

[Prof. Herb Emery]

You have a Canadian economy that is increasingly urbanizing around a small number of very large cities and centres, and you have a large number of traditional industries like fishing and agriculture that are being hollowed out in terms of the traditional working-age population. They are aging more rapidly than the cities. Getting workers into those regions to maintain production in plants that are not investing in automating and remain highly dependent on labour, that's where, again, a lot of these decisions around immigration were coming through as a reaction to the lack of investment we see in Canada in advanced manufacturing and in automation. We were keeping the legacy plants going by finding a new supply of labour to replace the traditional younger Canadian labour supply that was no longer there.

The challenges in Ontario with its post-secondary system are different from the challenges we're facing, let's say, with labour supply needs in the Atlantic region. In Ontario, I don't know if they were planning to use the increase in college-educated personal service workers coming out to solve some of the health care problems like they were in Atlantic Canada, but with the direct ties in the college system in our region, we're looking at programs that would produce graduates who could go to work in, say, the care sector, so there was at least some thinking around how to find the care workers for the population that isn't getting access to the services they need. Again, there was no study in advance on whether that works. It was based on a belief that you'll train them, that the jobs will be there and they'll take the jobs.

It's a rambling answer, but the real reason I think we did a lot of this was the labour shortage narrative that came in. A lot of employers were struggling to make ends meet with a lot of the margins and labour market policies coming in. If you can't raise your wages, you need to find another supply of labour to keep the lights on. I think that's what was happening in a lot of places.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you. The time is up.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Can I make one quick comment?

In other words, to summarize that, it's bringing in cheap labour, and now that the government has another crisis, it wants to blame the people who were brought in to provide cheap labour for the crisis that the government itself created.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you, MP Kwan.

Now we will go to Mr. Redekopp for two minutes.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Worswick, I want to clarify something. You talked about how when we bring immigrants in, we should be raising the average skill level. You talked about the average wages and things like that, and to me, you seemed to imply that applies to universities for sure, to colleges maybe, and to private schools not often.

What about polytechnics and some of the trades jobs in some of the areas where we have a great need and wages are very good? Are you saying that we shouldn't be bringing people in for that?

[Prof. Christopher Worswick]

No, what I'm suggesting is we should make the decision for allocation of international visas to higher education institutions based on expected earnings. At the polytechnics you're talking about, if the graduates have high earnings, then we should allocate international student visas to them, and maybe there are programs at universities that don't meet that criteria.

The way we use the comprehensive ranking system for immigration, we should try to develop something that's similar for international students, because otherwise, lobbying and politics are going to drive this, and we're going to end up placing international students in the wrong institutions.

I do think we have absorptive capacity issues, so we're constrained in that regard. Our health care system just can't expand fast enough to handle the volumes of people coming in that we've had.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you.

Mr. Emery, the Prime Minister talked about bad actors taking advantage of the programs, essentially blaming the problems in the immigration system on them. He talked about too many colleges and universities using international student programs to raise their bottom lines, and he talked about scammers targeting vulnerable immigrants.

Do you agree with the Prime Minister that the designated learning institutions, universities and colleges, essentially, are to blame for the fraud and the errors that happened in this program, or does the government bear some blame in this?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

You have 30 seconds, Mr. Emery.

[Prof. Herb Emery]

It sounds to me like there's been a failure of oversight in the implementation of who had the right to invite students in. I don't believe universities were abusing it to the degree we saw in some of those private colleges, so I think it's a regulatory failure or a policy failure.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Okay. Thank you.

I would like to welcome you, Mr. Chahal to the committee.

You probably want to ask questions, but I have to go to Mr. Chiang for two minutes.

Mr. Chiang, please go ahead.

[Paul Chiang, Liberal, Markham—Unionville, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Through you, my question is directed to Mr. Colleret.

In a 2021 study, economist Pierre Fortin found that Quebec would have to invest an additional $1.4 billion per year in universities to bring the funding in line with that of other Canadian provinces. In light of reports that provinces underfunded their post-secondary institutions leading to an over-reliance on international student tuition, don't you think the recent federal changes to the international student program were a direct result of provinces not adequately addressing the needs of post-secondary institutions? Also, do you have other recommendations for the committee to consider, especially in light of Quebec's jurisdiction on immigration and the bill regarding international students?

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Go ahead, Mr. Colleret.