Canada places 2-year cap on foreign student visas to ease housing pressures as cost of living soars

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet retreat in Montreal this week will prioritise affordability and housing, according to a government statement.

The government said there are around 1 million foreign students in the country now and without any sort of intervention, this number would have continued to increase. The total number of foreign students is more than three times what it was a decade ago.

Miller said they have been working on stabilising the number of people entering the country yearly as housing pressures mount.

Canada grew by about a million people last year, reaching a record of 40 million as many Canadians struggle with an increased cost of living, including rents and mortgages.

China takes aim at Canada’s move to block Chinese, Russian, Iranian research links

The immigration minister said there are unscrupulous universities taking advantage of high tuition fees paid by foreign students without offering a solid education in return. In some cases, the universities are a way into Canada for students who can parlay their visas into permanent residencies.

“It is not the intention of this programme to have sham commerce degrees or business degrees that are sitting on top of a massage parlour that someone doesn’t even go to and then they come into the province and drive an Uber,” Miller said. “If you need a dedicated channel for Uber drivers in Canada, I can design that, but that isn’t the intention of the international student programme.”

Opposition Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre called it a mess and blamed Trudeau for granting study permits to tens of thousands of students who attend fake schools.