Justin Trudeau’s immigration minister said citizenship and residency “should never be the promise” for foreign students getting an education in Canada.
Immigration Minister Mark Miller admitted in a Bloomberg interview that foreigners have been using the international student visa program as a “cheap way” to obtain permanent residency and citizenship in Canada.
“That should never be the promise,” Miller said in an interview with Bloomberg published Wednesday. “People should be coming here to educate themselves and perhaps go home and bring those skills back to their country.”
He noted that the government is trying to change the direction of some immigration policies to return to “its original intent,” where students come to Canada’s colleges and universities to learn, not just as an easy way to get a job and enter the country.
Miller committed to reducing the number of temporary residents over the next three years to 5% of the population, down from 6.2% in 2023—from 2.5 million temporary residents to just over two million.
The Liberal government might even surpass its goal announced in January to lower the international student cap, reducing new study permits by 35%.
According to an education recruitment company, the government is on track to reduce the number of international students by 48% from 436,678 study permits in 2023 to potentially 229,000 this year.
Since Trudeau took office, the number of post-graduate work permits has increased almost fourfold. According to Stats Canada, 27,200 annual PGWPs were issued in 2015, compared with 132,000 new PGWP holders in 2022.
Bloomberg also reported that the Liberal government is looking to address the issues surrounding the temporary foreign worker program being “used and abused” by business owners trying to make easy money.
Labour market impact assessments are intended to prevent the system from being misused. They force businesses that want to hire temporary foreign workers to prove their need for them and ensure that they have tried to hire Canadians first. The worry is that business owners are selling these LMIAs to foreign workers, exploiting both the hopeful newcomers to Canada and the system itself.
In 2023, the Liberal government issued more temporary foreign worker permits than the previous year despite Canada’s rising unemployment rate. The rate rose from 6.2% in May to 6.4% in June 2024, continuing its steady climb of 1.3% since April 2023.
Historically, an unemployment rate of over 6% in an economic region would trigger an automatic rejection of temporary foreign worker applications in lower-wage businesses, such as food and retail. However, permits continue to be issued due to the Liberal government removing the automatic rejection policy in April 2022.
“Removing the automatic refusal to process (the LMIAs) will help employers in regions where severe labour shortages have persisted despite an unemployment rate of 6% or higher,” the announcement read.
By June 2023, two territories and nearly six provinces were at or above the 6% unemployment rate threshold, yet more TFW permits were issued that year. The four Atlantic provinces were above 6%, with PEI, Newfoundland, Labrador, and Nunavut above 8% unemployment.
Between Jan. 1 and Sept. 30, Immigration Refugees Citizenship Canada issued 147,863 work permits under the TFW program. This is up over 50% from 96,437 over the same period in 2022.
The government attributed the rise in temporary foreign workers to the economy re-opening after the COVID-19 pandemic. However, before the pandemic in 2019, Canada issued 98,310 permits through the TFWP, which is about the same number as in 2022.
Government policies such as reducing the cap on how many TFWs a business can hire from 30% to 20% and cutting the time that LMIAs are valid in half from 12 months to six months are expected to bring the amount of new TFW permits being issued down in 2024 when compared to 2023.