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.