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—