Citizenship and Immigration Committee on Sept. 25th, 2025

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Good afternoon. I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number four of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration.

Today’s meeting is taking place in a hybrid format. Indeed, all of our witnesses are joining us via Zoom today. I will be introducing all of our witnesses more formally in a minute, but on behalf of the committee, I extend a warm welcome to all of you. We really appreciate your taking and making the time today.

I'm going to start off with a few general comments, just to ensure that we have a smooth running of our meeting, and then I want to provide a small update to committee members about some upcoming meetings.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate it, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking. For those on Zoom, at the bottom of your screen you can select the appropriate channel for interpretation: floor, English or French. For those in the room, you can use the earpiece and select the desired channel. I remind you that all comments should be addressed through the chair.

Members, please raise your hand if you wish to speak, whether participating in person or via Zoom. The clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best we can. I thank you in advance for your co-operation.

Before we begin, for your information, committee members, the minister will appear on Thursday, October 2, regarding Bill C-3. That is next Thursday, October 2. Consequently, as we have agreed, the clause-by-clause study of Bill C-3 will be held on Tuesday, October 7. We have to set a deadline for the submission of amendments to the bill. The clerk is recommending a deadline for submissions of Friday, October 3, at 12 p.m. That's to submit your amendments so that the package of amendments can be distributed 48 hours before the clause-by-clause.

Is that agreed?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Consequently, just so everybody is on the same page, based on our calendar, the next meeting with witnesses regarding the international student program and study permits, after today, would be on Thursday, October 9.

Okay. We're back to why we are all here: the international student program and study permits. Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on September 16, 2025, the committee is commencing its study of the international student program and study permits.

I would like to welcome our witnesses for today's meeting. This is for our first hour. We have six witnesses: We have three in the first hour and another three in the second hour.

From the Canadian Bureau for International Education, we have Larissa Bezo, president and chief executive officer, by video conference. From the Higher Education Strategy Associates, we have Alex Usher, president. From The Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University, we have André Côté, executive director.

You will each have five minutes for your opening remarks, after which we will proceed to rounds of questions.

I invite Larissa Bezo to begin.

[Larissa Bezo, President and Chief Executive Officer, Canadian Bureau for International Education]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you for this opportunity to contribute to your deliberations.

I won't mince words: The impacts of IRCC's policy changes over the past 20 months are serious and far-reaching and will be long-lasting.

Annual caps were followed by plummeting approval rates, drastically increased processing times and increased applicant requirements. We may have successfully addressed a numbers issue, but Canada is no longer competitive in attracting global talent. The international student program has lost sight of Canada's long-term growth, prosperity, labour market, research and innovation objectives. The changes represent a serious overcorrection that risks further eroding Canada's international reputation. Without action, there will be continued damage inflicted on our education institutions, labour markets, economic prospects and competitiveness. Canada needs global talent to sustain and grow our economy and to counter our aging population and declining birth rate. Canada's future prosperity and growth hinge on those who choose to study in Canada and ultimately make this country home.

We need to strategically rebuild international education—not in terms of returning to the volume of international students entering Canada before the cap, but, rather, better, smarter and with purpose, as well as ethical, sustainable and supportive of Canada's long-term national strategy, while concurrently ensuring program integrity. We have a new opportunity now to leverage the international student program to maximize the benefits for Canada in this key moment of nation building and geopolitical turmoil.

IRCC's policy changes are crushing a sector that in 2024 contributed $38.6 billion to Canada's GDP, over 1.7% of the total. In addition, international students graduating from our institutions account for over 40% of economic class immigrants and over one-third of Canadian entrepreneurs.

Applications to our universities and colleges are plummeting. It's not surprising, given that new study permits dropped by 70% between January and June, well in excess of IRCC's goals. These measures have devastated the system, and Canada's reputation along with it. Corrosive public rhetoric, alongside constrictive policy changes, has accelerated sector decline. We are even witnessing active attacks and hate crimes against international students.

Canada's welcoming reputation has disappeared in political narratives and policy statements, and the sector is struggling. Since the fall of 2024, Canadian institutions have announced 35 site closures, 863 program suspensions and the loss of over 10,000 jobs, with many more to come. These are not fly-by-night diploma mills; our greatest institutions have experienced severely reduced application and acceptance volumes and have been forced to make difficult cuts.

Without coordinated action to attract and retain global talent, Canada risks falling short of its economic, innovation and geopolitical objectives, undermining key national strategies and nation-building projects. To rebuild a smarter, more resilient system, we need an ethical, sustainable and coordinated approach that benefits all Canadians.

To address these questions and more, in May 2024, CBIE hosted a multi-stakeholder national dialogue on international students, with over 225 organizations represented, to begin charting a path forward for the Canadian international education sector. There were four key themes that emerged.

First, Canada's education sector needs a period of government policy stability and predictability. Our global brand needs time to heal. The sector and students will recalibrate to current policy; however, it requires a predictable policy environment.

Second, we need a new narrative about international education, both at home and abroad. Domestically, the narrative needs to focus on international education's value to Canadians and why it is important. Internationally, we must focus on the quality of our education system, preparing a global workforce, and our ethical international education practices.

Third, we need a global talent strategy in support of Canada's future economic, innovation and demographic goals. A centre of excellence for international education would provide for policy innovation, research, capacity building and strategic coordination in international education. Canada can no longer afford to risk losing global talent.

Fourth, we need to be clear that this isn't solely an immigration issue. Talent development and attraction cuts across departments and needs whole-of-government coordination: Global Affairs to align trade and diplomatic priorities, ISED to define industrial policy and Canada's research and innovation agenda, ESDC to ensure alignment with labour market and human resources development, the intergovernmental affairs secretariat to ensure provincial and territorial engagement, and Public Safety to address security considerations.

International education is a key part of Canada’s strengths, and an even more important part of its future. CBIE and our members look forward to working collaboratively with government, community and industries to realize a bold, renewed vision for international education in a global knowledge economy.

Thank you for the opportunity to share.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Thank you, Ms. Bezo. That was a little over five minutes, but you did an excellent job.

It's very nice to see you, Mr. Usher. Welcome.

You now have five minutes to speak.

[Alex Usher, President, Higher Education Strategy Associates]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thanks for the invitation to appear at the committee.

I thought it would be helpful to say, just for the sake of clarity here, that when we talk about the international student program, we're really talking about three different things. It's not always clear to me that everybody is talking about the same thing.

There are student visas, and we've had these since we began handing out visas of any kind. I don't think it should be particularly controversial to say that if a student wants to spend their money at a Canadian institution, they should be allowed to do so. That seems uncontroversial to me. We could talk about what the conditions are on that visa. We can talk about what the right length of stay is, what work rights are associated with it and so forth, but if people want to buy an education here, let them buy it.

The second is postgraduate work visas. We don't talk very much about these, but these are the visas that allow students to stay for a period of a few months after their studies. These were not really a thing even 20 or 25 years ago, but they were a way that many countries, including the U.K. and Australia, which are two of our biggest competitors, used to make their institutions more attractive to international students. If you want our institutions to be competitive, you have to start thinking about what that looks like, and you can't be too far away from global norms.

The third one—and this is the one that I think has gotten everyone in a tizzy over the last five years or so—is the link to permanent residency, which I believe Canada introduced in 2007. It was early in the Harper years. We were the only country to say that you could go from a degree, a certificate or a postgraduate visa to some kind of path toward permanent residency. We did that because 20 years ago, among the top issues in public policy around immigration was the idea that immigrants were not integrated into the labour force fast enough. They didn't have Canadian experience. The idea, again from the Harper PMO, was, “Hey, why don't we have a certain fraction of our immigrants have Canadian experience before they get here?” That was the idea. That is where this path to citizenship was born.

That kind of makes sense. That logic still makes a certain amount of sense. Look, all of this worked until the moment when it didn't. A couple of years ago, we got this toxic mix of five things. We had institutions that had not initially been considered the target of the permanent residency program realizing they could monetize it. When this policy was adopted in 2007, people were mostly thinking about universities. It didn't occur to them that colleges would come along and monetize this policy.

You had provincial governments—mainly, but not exclusively, Conservative—that realized that if institutions could monetize this policy, Canadian governments didn't need to subsidize universities and colleges so much. This is great. Lots of people did that.

You then had a Liberal federal government that, mainly because of COVID-era inflation, thought that turning international students into de facto temporary foreign workers was a great idea. We upped the work permit hours from 20 hours a week to 40 hours a week. Guess what happened. From all over the world, students started flooding in because we now had by far the most generous set of conditions across those three programs of anyone.

Then, as soon as everyone realized that things weren't going too well, that we had too many students and that it was affecting housing prices and that kind of stuff, everyone started finger pointing. This wasn't our country's finest hour. We could have done better. We should have done better.

What we ended up with was a federal government that barely understood what was going on, lashing out, acting alone, doing anything it could to bring the numbers down with only the barest understanding of the system it was regulating. Of course, we ended up with a dog’s breakfast. However, I think it's not so much a product of the policies. Yes, you can point to certain policies for certain actions like that, but the real causes here are that, one, we underinvest in operational and data systems, which leaves decision-makers poorly informed and the system as a whole insecure, and two, we have almost no instinct anymore for co-operative federalism. This was a clear case where governments should have been talking to one another, and they weren't. They should have been including institutions, as well. We have brutally siloed decision-making.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Mr. Usher, you're going to have to wrap up in 30 seconds.

[Alex Usher]

Okay.

We also have difficulty having complicated, joined-up policy discussions when issues cross policy fields, because so much of our policy-making involves ministers and their political staff making policy on the fly and behind closed doors.

As you make your decisions and as we reflect on this national failure, think about how to solve those systemic issues in policy-making, and not just come up with how to make the right policy. Absent really basic changes in the way we make decisions in complex policy areas, the nature of the next crisis might be different, but the basic dilemma of poor policy-making will remain.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Thank you, Mr. Usher.

André Côté, you have the floor.

[André Côté, Executive Director, The Dais, Toronto Metropolitan University]

Thank you, Chair, and thank you to the committee for inviting me to speak.

My name is André Côté, and I am the executive director of The Dais, which is a think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University. We're focused on public policy at the intersection of technology, education and democracy. In a past life, I was a senior adviser to an Ontario higher education minister, so I have some experience in government on these and other related issues.

We, at The Dais, have been doing a bunch of work on the international education file over the last couple of years. We launched a project shortly after the original January 2024 announcements. It was kind of like the times before Miller, before the announcement, and the times after the announcement. What we wanted to focus on was not just the immediate turmoil—we'll call it that—in the wake of it, but also how we think about the long-term future of the system in Canada. We hosted round tables with a whole range of players across the country. We published a report earlier this year, so I'll hit a few points there.

To begin, I commend the committee, first—and that's where Larissa started—for keeping this issue on the agenda. Frankly, there were a bunch of reforms last year, and it's like a half-completed project, so it's important that we come back to it. I also commend you for the kind of systems lens you're taking, because that's what it is. It's a very complex system, so it's good to have good starting points.

The first point is that we need to focus on fixing Canada's international education system for the future, rather than assigning blame for the past. You're going to hear from many speakers who have expressed great frustration and anger about the reforms last year; however, we have to be honest with ourselves: Many things contributed to what was essentially the failure of the system in a variety of ways that other speakers have spoken to.

With the federal government and the way the reforms were executed, sure, you can point to some problems, but the provinces were hugely complicit, some provinces in particular. Universities and colleges themselves, many of which pursued really aggressive growth strategies, also incented that. There were also recruitment agents and other players. There were many who contributed. Instead of dwelling on that, let's focus our energies on fixing the system to the benefit of Canada and doing right by foreign students here. That's the first point.

Second, to get into the reforms themselves, we have been broadly supportive of the previous government's core reforms to reduce and cap the size of the program and tie it to the broader immigration levels and planned targets for temporary residents; to do things like tightening up postgraduate work permits and eliminating the private partnerships, which were quite egregious even dating back to my days in the Ontario government; to put more focus on integrity and accountability mechanisms with designated learning institutions, and some other aspects, smart minor changes, such as the changes in working hours, which someone mentioned.

That being said, the federal reforms overstepped into some domains that are better managed by the provinces or the institutions, or maybe not at all. I would point to two of them. One would be the postgraduate work permit eligibility for colleges being tied to in-demand programs. Basically, out of IRCC, you're sort of dictating a list of 1,000 programs. Someone referred to a dog's breakfast. I think that's what that is. That one has been very challenging. The real question is, is that something the federal government should be doing? There were also changes for graduate students, including the cap and limiting work eligibility for spouses. Simply put, these are areas that the IRCC is not well equipped to intervene in. It pushes into provincial jurisdiction. To us, it's better to either scrap it or delegate it to provinces and territories.

We have many other pieces around the policy in our report, but I'll close here.

The policies themselves have not changed much since the last Parliament, or with this new government, but the landscape has changed in two very critical ways, I would say. The first is that we've come to fully appreciate the extent of the damage to brand Canada from the crisis in terms of our international reputation and in terms of what it has meant for study permit applications.

We've seen the projections for 2025, for example, not even meeting the hugely reduced targets. Even more worrying is that we've seen the numbers of new study permit submissions fall dramatically. Larissa made the point that it requires a concerted effort to fix this. It's across FPTs and the post-secondary sector. We need a team Canada approach here.

The flip side is that, while our brand has taken a big hit, there's a global shift toward anti-immigration sentiment, closed borders, and in particular what's happened in the U.S. with the terrifying ICE raids, and now with this $100,000—

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Mr. Côté, please wrap up.

[André Côté]

Okay.

The visa piece gives us a big opportunity.

Just to leave off where some of the other speakers did, refocused efforts on international education—to attract talent into a smaller but better system, but also to attract other world-class graduate, postgraduate and academic faculty into our universities and into our economy—form part of the global skills strategy approach.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Thank you so much, Mr. Côté.

Thanks to all of you for the excellent beginning to our conversation over the next hour.

Before we begin our first round of questions, I want to remind everyone of two things. First, for our witnesses, the first set of three questioners in a round will have six minutes for questions. It's important for you to know this, because we have a lot of questions. We're hoping you can respond to them with haste. I wanted to mention that. The second round is generally five minutes. I usually say whether it will be five minutes or six minutes or two and a half minutes so that you will have an idea of how long it will be.

Just as a reminder to everyone in the room, let's allow the opportunity for our witnesses to respond to the questions. Thank you.

Our first questioner will be Mr. Redekopp, for six minutes.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for being here today.

I'll start with you, Mr. Usher. In 2022, federal public servants warned the immigration department about a lack of housing. This was in an article that came out: “The deputy minister, among others, was warned in 2022 that housing construction had not kept up with the pace of population growth.” You said in your 2023 report that “there are increasing pressures from communities around the number of international students being recruited in the wake of various housing crises.”

Did you raise these alarm bells around housing with the government at that time?

[Alex Usher]

I'm sorry. Is that question for me?

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

It's for you, Mr. Usher.

[Alex Usher]

Okay.

I don't speak to the government very often. I don't work for the Government of Canada. I've never had a contract with Immigration. I write a blog. If you call that “raising” it, I suppose, yes, I did, but in no other way.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

All right. Thanks.

Mr. Côté, did you see this housing shortage problem coming in 2022?

[André Côté]

I can't really recall with any certainty whether I did.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Basically, we had a government that got advice. People could see this coming, and yet it chose to do nothing. In 2022-23, when the student population was beginning to explode, did you see any evidence that the government was talking with colleges about concerns over housing capacity?

[André Côté]

Is that one for me?

[The Chair, Liberal, Julie Dzerowicz]

Yes, Mr. Côté, it's for you.

[André Côté]

To answer that directly, I did not see any evidence. Honestly, I feel that the way this unfolded.... Coming out of the pandemic, I think we had basically 30% growth year over year for two straight years. There was this moment, later in 2023, when it was announced that the number of international students had topped a million, and jaws dropped, frankly. Honestly, I think there was a bit of a lack of oversight in the growth of the system. I'm not sure if it was straight on the housing issue, but I think the housing then became an issue, as we saw the pressures there.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Côté. I think you're right that jaws dropped. I think it was quite shocking that the government had no clue what was going on there.

I'll go to you, Ms. Bezo. Your 2023 annual report did not mention anything about housing shortages. Did any of your member institutions raise the housing shortage issue with you?

[Larissa Bezo]

As we were seeing the growth that Mr. Côté spoke about coming out of the pandemic—substantive growth, year over year—we were certainly seeing some pressure start to build in certain communities. We saw institutions taking initiative to engage with stakeholders within their communities and to look at these issues.