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Immigration Minister Marc Miller accused Canadian universities of sourcing too many students from India, and said he expects a better “diversity” of international students in future.
He also said Canada needs to return to relying on “quality” over “quantity” of immigrants. “I think we do need to make sure that the Canadian brand does focus on excellence, on quality, and less quantity,” he said.
The comments were delivered at a media roundtable in Brampton, Ont., one of the Canadian cities most impacted by an unprecedented spike in immigration overseen by the Trudeau government since 2021. Miller was hosted by Brampton Centre MP Shafqat Ali.
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In just the last three years, Canada’s population has grown by 2.9 million — an average influx of 81,000 new people every month. Many of those have come in on temporary visas; as per a November report by Statistics Canada, there are now three million non-permanent residents in Canada.
Brampton has experienced this immigration wave more acutely than anyone else, with immigration making it the country’s fastest growing big city. In just a single year between 2021 and 2022, the city’s population jumped by a record 89,077.
This has also made Brampton the home of Canada’s fastest-growing rents. And it’s made the city a focal point for a new phenomenon of job fairs being utterly overwhelmed by applicants. In one example from 2023, a mid-sized Brampton grocery store advertising open positions attracted a line-up of several hundred applicants snaking around the block.
In October, Miller introduced a package of reforms to “pause population growth,” including stricter quotas on both permanent and non-permanent immigration.
Miller opened the Brampton event by saying that he expected “hopes will be dashed” as many of Canada’s millions of temporary residents see their visas expire without having secured permanent residency.
“It’s going to be a rough ride; part of cleaning up this challenge that we see will mean that people’s hopes will be dashed to some extent,” said the minister, adding that “no one was guaranteed automatic permanent residency.”
He also said, “The solution is not to give visas to absolutely everyone simply because they don’t want to leave.”
Miller also maintained that none of the massive increase in immigration was his government’s fault, placing the blame instead on colleges, provincial governments and other “bad actors” who sponsored outsized numbers of international migrants, sometimes under fraudulent grounds.
Although he allowed that there “probably should have been better oversight, but that’s water under the bridge.”
Miller also accused schools of relying too heavily on students from India – who at times have comprised up to half of all international students in the country.
“I would say universities and colleges have been going to one or two source countries, and constantly going back to the well on that — we expect diversity of students,” he said.
The minister said he’d asked universities and colleges to “put a little more effort into the price of acquisition.”
“You have to be able to invest more in the talent you’re bringing here, and that includes going to more countries,” he said.
The event was held just as Miller’s office published information showing that in 2024 alone, 50,000 people entered Canada on study permits and then never showed up to class.
Canada has also been seeing rising rates of students claiming asylum in an apparent bid to stave off deportation. In just the first nine months of 2024, 14,000 people who entered Canada on student permits claimed asylum.
“It doesn’t make sense that you come here, spend a year, and that if you didn’t have the conditions in your home country to cause you to be an asylum seeker on day one … that you should be entitled to (the asylum) process,” he said, adding that any exceptions are “rare.”
The current waiting list just to have an asylum claim reviewed is up to three years — during which time the claimant can stay in Canada and even secure work permits and government benefits. Miller said that if Parliament wasn’t currently prorogued, he would introduce a bill to ensure that student asylum claims were dealt with in a “more efficient” fashion.
The Feb. 8 roundtable occurred just a few days after Canada was given a reprieve from tariffs threatened by the United States over the issue of border security.
Miller mentioned that Canada receives far more illegal border-crossers from the U.S. than vice versa, but said that the Americans had a point in that security along their northern border keeps intercepting foreign nationals who “have come through airports at Montreal and Pearson (Toronto).”
“That’s not right, we need to have proper control over the issuance of our visas,” said Miller.
IN OTHER NEWS
One of the more catastrophic experiments in Canadian public health policy has just come to an end. In 2020, B.C. started giving free recreational opioids to addicts on the premise that it would curb overdoses by steering drug users away from tainted black market drugs. But addicts immediately began selling their “safer supply” prescriptions for harder drugs – and the overdose rate stayed as high as ever. After months of dismissing mounting evidence that safer supply was only putting more drugs into the black market, this week B.C. finally put a stop to the program. Addicts can still receive free opioids from the government, but now they have to do them in front of a medical professional.
A recent Leger poll asked Canadians if they considered the United States to be an “ally,” an “enemy” or “neutral.” The three possible responses ended up receiving roughly equal support: 27 per cent for enemy, 30 per cent for ally and 27 per cent for neutral.
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