Granting an ever-growing number of student visas to people we know will struggle to find housing is unethical at best and fraudulent at worst.
We need to dramatically cut the number of student visas, especially for private colleges, some of which are offering a quality of education that is less than desirable. We then need to tie student visas to housing availability – that is, a university shouldn’t be allowed to take on more international students than it can house in that community, for the duration of that person’s time studying in Canada.
Why is Canada trying to attract so many international students? Because it’s easier than properly funding post secondary institutions:
international students are cash cows. Tuition fees for domestic students are regulated by provincial governments. Not so for their international counterparts, which makes bringing in foreign learners incredibly lucrative for perpetually cash-strapped schools and universities. (The real growth is increasingly not just from universities, but also from private colleges.)
The housing crisis has a bunch of causes, from Airbnb, to shitty taxation policies, to NIMBYs, to regressive zoning. Tying student visas to available, reasonably priced housing would be a simple first step to reducing prices.
The op-ed states they’re are around 800,000 foreign students in Canada. In a lot of cases, students are coming into towns that don’t have enough homes for rent, and the universities/colleges aren’t stepping up to build housing. Cape Breton University sounds like a particularly severe example.
I don’t think anyone would say the housing crisis has a single cause. Shitty zoning restrictions, NIMBYs, Airbnb, low interest rates, all play a part as well.
CBU absolutely abuses the student visa program. The housing situation in Sydney has been awful now for a few years, but unless there is some disincentive for CBU I don’t see it changing, unfortunately.