In the spirit of looking ahead, I focus on three recommendations.
Number one is that international education and immigration need to be delinked as policy files.
The purpose of international education and recruitment of international students should not be to meet our immigration or labour market targets and objectives. Certainly, our immigration assessment can value and provide special recognition for Canadian credentials, but we have created issues in the system by linking what should be two distinct—connected, but distinct—policy objectives. By intertwining these policy objectives, we have sent conflicting messages as to why international students should come to study in Canada and why we are interested in hosting them.
We began going down this path with our first international education strategy in 2014, when we welcomed international students to study and stay in Canada as our ideal immigrants. However, their own experiences in the Canadian labour market were far from ideal.
Canada is unique in the sense that whether it was the Conservatives or the Liberals, we have all been pro-international student recruitment and retention. Unfortunately, we turned a blind eye to how this policy shift created a flood of students to programs and institutions and encouraged the growth of associated businesses, both domestically and internationally—some legitimate, others not—that were there to take advantage of the system, paving the way for both students and non-students to join institutions as a pathway to immigration versus pursuing education.
Next, during the pandemic, and even after the pandemic, we lost sight of the difference between international students and temporary workers by enabling the students to take jobs in which they were working over the limit of 20 hours per week, further blurring the line between student and foreign worker status.
My second recommendation is that we need to invest in policy learning, not just policy borrowing.
Canada has been interested in borrowing and copying policy from our competitor countries. Ironically, while we have done this well, we have not been good about studying and learning from the mistakes of other countries. For example, Australia went through this very same experience about 10 to 15 years ago. We wrote about this in 2013 in an article entitled “Imagine: Canada as a leader in international education. How can Canada benefit from the Australian experience?”
Australia went about aggressively recruiting international students, with their higher educational institutions equally incentivized to recruit large numbers to fill their funding gaps. Their student programs were linked to immigration. The outcomes of all of these policies were very negative. There were imbalances and unregulated growth of programs and private institutions. There were challenges within communities, given this high growth rate. Chinese and Indian international students were becoming victims of assaults, and there was overall exploitation of them in the housing and employment market. There are a lot of parallels in how this story has unfolded and continues to unfold in Canada.
My third and final point has to do with why and how international students can benefit Canada and Canadians.
Rather than thinking in terms of immediate benefits by way of income to our institutions and communities or by meeting our labour market and immigration needs, I urge us to consider international students as a strong soft power resource, because the free flow of students and scholars has served and will serve Canada's interests—