Good morning. Thank you so much for the opportunity to contribute to these important deliberations. I'm connecting to you virtually from Ottawa, the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinabe.
CBE 150-plus member institutions reflect the full spectrum of Canada's international education from K to 12 to FTS.D.s, spanning almost two million students. We are immensely proud of Canada's status as the destination of choice for international students, and we are acutely aware of the need to protect, maintain and, where possible, enhance Canada's standing in a fiercely competitive global market.
Accordingly, we commend the committee's interest in shedding light on how student visa applications are processed, including why rejection rates differ across Canadian visa offices and how we can do better to keep these rejection rates as low as possible.
Because each rejection letter is not only personally devastating for the student who has successfully qualified for admission to a Canadian institution, each rejection also arguably represents a failure of process, a waste of resources for the student and the host institution, a loss of opportunity for the community where the student planned to study, and fewer chances to leverage the people-to-people ties that come through education to promote Canada's long-term global engagement and future prosperity.
The problem is growing. Canada's rejection rate for student visa applications has increased in recent years. It is especially concerning in specific country and regional contexts; Africa, and francophone Africa in particular.
We need to be mindful that these failures of process do not end up being interpreted by potential international student candidates as failures of respect. The reputational risks for the Canada brand are significant.
Canada's IE sector has seen exponential growth in recent years, increasing by some 135% since 2009. This has occurred against the backdrop of an increasingly ambitious immigration program and, more recently, the pandemic.
To cope, ICC has had to change gears and increase its reliance on technology to help process applications. Unfortunately, student visa rejection rates have increased in lockstep with this growth, from 31% overall in 2016 to 53% in 2020. The growing disconnect between policy ambition and processing capacity is hard to ignore.
While it's important to pay attention to rejection rates for study permits, we strongly encourage the committee to consider the interconnectedness of this problem with the wider issues of policy coherence and integration across Canada's international education sector.
There are three issues I want to touch on very briefly. The first is what we are hearing from our institutions, that there are some troubling disconnects in the current system. We are aware that many well-qualified students have had their permit applications rejected, over half a million since 2016. Student study permit approval rates in some Canadian visa processing centres overseas have been and remain extremely low despite official policy direction through the international education strategy that Canada should diversify its source countries for international students.
Discretion is clearly being exercised, as it should be, given Canada's legitimate national interest concerns and to select students who have the best chance of succeeding, but where and how this discretion is being exercised is often opaque.
At a minimum, we need to ensure some level of consistency across visa centres so that we can test and validate that, where discretion is being applied, it is being done fairly and in a way that reflects Canadian values and Government of Canada priorities.
Second, with regard to dual intent, we encourage the committee to take a strong position on this issue. Dual intent is a simple concept that acknowledges the reality that many international students might want to both complete their study programs in Canada and then remain here to live and work. It lets them declare up front their plans to do so without creating the perverse incentives our current system has for them to misrepresent their intentions.
Indeed, if it is the stated policy of the Government of Canada to address our demographic deficit through immigration and to attract the best and brightest young immigrants to Canada, let us create a program that formally acknowledges and encourages this type of candidate.
With regard to dual intent, there is a broader need for a more integrated—