Come to Canada to study, live under a bridge.

Ethical questions must be raised about the human cost of government failing to build homes while exponentially increasing demand.

Last month, the National Post reported on how an extreme shortage of affordable housing left an international student in Kitchener living under a bridge. 

Sadly, that young man is far from the only one in that situation.

Across Canada, post-secondary students - domestic and international alike - face homelessness as the demand for every type of housing in Canada has far outstripped supply. And as virtually every segment of the Canadian population struggles with rents and mortgages that have, in many cases, more than doubled over the last eight years, ethical questions about a lack of political courage to do what it takes to build homes coupled with exponentially increasing demand for housing must be raised. And there's no better illustration of the tension between maintaining the broken status quo and a clear need to change it than the state of the Canadian international student permitting process.

Here's why.

When a non-Canadian attends a Canadian university or college, they pay a substantially higher amount of tuition than a student with Canadian permanent residency or citizenship. Said in a different way, international students are revenue boons. Statistics Canada reports that in 2020/2021, international students paid five times more tuition than their domestic counterparts. In 2017/2018, as much as 40% of all tuition revenue received by Canadian universities came from international students. In dollar amounts, according to a report in Policy Options, "in eight years, the enrolment of international students in universities has nearly doubled. At the college level, it's about tripled. The revenue from international student fees in universities and degree-granting colleges was $12.7 billion in 2019-2020." 

It's a matter of fact that many Canadian universities and colleges have rapidly exposed themselves to financial risk due to becoming heavily reliant on international student tuition to cover a significant portion of their operating costs. However, the government has imposed no obligation for those institutions to do things with that money to provide these students with a humane experience during their stay, like building housing to put them in. 

What international student tuition revenues are actually used for varies from institution to institution. For example, for many publicly-funded Canadian research intensive universities, the critical metric they chase (even if they don't like to admit it) is attracting top-tier researchers to grow their reputations as successful academic research enterprises. That requires funding for salaries, new research labs and equipment, and associated operating costs. In the case of for-profit educational institutions, the real revenue goal is even easier to see. 

And while those goals may have merit, they don't address the human problem students living under bridges and in cars face. And they ignore the fact that international student tuition revenue is derived by a permitting process that is overseen by various levels of government, that clearly needs a rethink on what needs to be overseen. 

And beyond bringing home the tuition bacon for universities and colleges, international students have other vital roles in the Canadian economy that are being put at risk by a lack of housing. As Canada's population rapidly ages out of the workforce and its natural rate of replacement sags, many of those students are a potential source of skilled labour for Canada. But after facing living conditions like being duped into living in a cockroach-infested, three-bedroom home with 14 other people and having virtually no prospect of being able to afford a home after graduation, how many of these students will choose to stay in Canada permanently?

At the end of 2022, there were a staggering 807,750 international students in Canada, a dramatic increase from figures seen at the start of the federal Liberal government's tenure in 2015. While the government was busy juicing these numbers, they clearly were giving little thought given to correlating the number of study permits to housing vacancy rates or to what percentage of a publicly funded educational institution's operating budget should be financed by international student tuition. Nor did they level any significant consequences against institutions who disregarded what few guidelines do exist. Governments also have done little to nothing to prevent outright fraud in international student permitting that is so bad that it’s only a shade away from human trafficking. 

So it's clear that this fever-point intersection of a lackadaisical, broken federal immigration system with a nonexistent federal housing strategy has far-reaching consequences, even when solely focusing on international students. Canadian universities and colleges' financial and reputational risk exposure is now unignorable. Canada risks losing out on skilled immigrant workers.

And more concerningly, this massive policy failure risks undermining Canada's hard-won consensus for immigration. A very recent Abacus poll revealed concerning trends on this topic, and directly attributed the results in part to competition over scarce housing supply. The responsibility for this extremely negative trend lies squarely at the feet of government Ministers who for years have failed to properly plan.

But those problems have now been laid bare for all to see and a response is needed. To date, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s reaction was to shuffle his former immigration Minister Sean Fraser, who presided over the percolation of this international student housing crisis, from the immigration file into the critical housing ministry. Interestingly, this was the same path one of his predecessors, Ahmed Hussen, took. The question many are asking now is, will history repeat itself?

Hussen oversaw a ballooning backlog in Canada's immigration system as Immigration Minister. Then he served as the incumbent Housing Minister while Canada's housing supply crisis spiralled out of control. To date, Fraser (in either of his Ministerial roles) and Trudeau have yet to state any desire to couple supports like adequate housing supply to Canada's immigration levels, much less indicate that a radical new plan to deliver on housing for anyone is in the cards. In fact, Fraser has already been out pushing a message that outright ignores the major structural issues that are preventing housing from being built, like onerous regulation, lack of skilled trades, lack of affordable capital, and NIMBYism.

So, unfortunately for that student under the bridge, the present signals from the federal government is still that there's not a lot of hope that things will change for him unless there's a change in government.

He, and millions of others, don’t have that much time to wait.