Author: Riley Donovan
Riley Donovan is a freelance journalist and the editor of Dominion Review. He writes for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
The International Student Program is now associated with crowded basement rooming houses, viral videos of unscrupulous foreign students boasting of stocking up on “free food” in food banks, students exploited by unscrupulous landlords and bosses, and an explosive growth in gang crime.
The bad press continued this summer, as videos spread of foreign students in Alberta protesting against work permit refusals.
Much of this chaos stems from the enormous growth in temporary residents after the Trudeau government took office in 2015.
Growth peaked in 2023 when Canada registered a population increase of nearly 1.3 million, roughly two-thirds of which was driven by temporary residents. That year, the number of post-secondary international students reached 833,000.
In 2024, the Trudeau government responded to the numbers by imposing a cap on international study permits and later announced a further reduction for 2025. The Carney government cut international student targets further in November 2025.
But numbers are only part of the problem. Study permit caps fail to solve the main flaw of study permits: they are no longer about studying.
Why are more people trying to get Canadian study permits than in previous decades? Generally, it is not to acquire skills, taste Tim Hortons or experience their first snowfall. Demand for study permits is high because they offer a pathway to work and permanent residency.
That was not always the case. Canada’s foreign student program shifted into a foreign worker and permanent residency program because of federal policy changes beginning in the early 2000s.
From the Second World War through the 1960s, international students in Canada were viewed as what University of the Fraser Valley professor Dale McCartney describes in a 2016 paper for Historical Studies in Education as “welcome sojourners.”
They were expected to arrive, learn and then leave with the skills to build up their homelands, and hopefully a healthy dose of goodwill toward Canada that would yield dividends if they rose to prominence in their nation’s government or business sector. Thus, international education served as short-term foreign aid and long-term international relations.
The 1976 Immigration Act formalized that temporary status by designating students as visitors. They could not work or apply for landed immigrant status.
Cementing the position of foreign students as “permanent outsiders to the Canadian nation,” as Professor McCartney puts it in a 2021 paper for the Canadian Journal of Higher Education, paved the way for provinces to allow universities to charge them higher tuition.
Higher tuition gave universities a reason to recruit more international students, but growth remained limited. Between 1970 and 2000, the number of post-secondary international students in Canada rose gently from an estimated 15,000 to almost 79,000.
Then the trajectory changed. By 2010, the number had skyrocketed to roughly 174,000.
This new astronomical growth coincided with Ottawa intentionally linking study permits to work and immigration.
The 2001 Immigration and Refugee Protection Act replaced the 1976 Immigration Act, erasing the division between studying and immigrating. Before, international students were expected to remain temporary and were prohibited from applying for immigrant status while in Canada. Under the new law, intending to eventually become a permanent resident was no longer a barrier to temporary status.
Ottawa then opened the door to work.
In 2006, Ottawa launched the off-campus work permit program, allowing international students to work off campus for up to 20 hours a week during the school year and full time during school breaks.
In 2008, the post-graduation work permit, which began as a series of regionally specific pilots, expanded nationally, allowing eligible graduates to remain in Canada and work for up to three years.
Those links between studying and working remain today. Eligible international students can work off campus for up to 24 hours a week during the school year and without an hourly limit during scheduled breaks.
The link to immigration remains as well. A post-secondary education in Canada now gives you extra points on the Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS), our points-based immigration system. Time spent in Canada as a student before becoming a permanent resident can also count toward the physical presence requirement for citizenship.
Two decades on, work and permanent residency are baked into the foreign student program.
Students clearly understand those incentives. Data from the Canadian Bureau for International Education indicates that 70 per cent of international students plan to apply for a post-graduation work permit, and 53 per cent plan to apply for permanent residence.
Work and permanent residency are not side effects of the International Student Program. They are incentives built into it.
Putting caps on the International Student Program merely slows the growth of a program that has lost its way. The real fix is to separate the program from work and immigration by ending the right of foreign students to work off campus, scrapping the post-graduation work permit and closing all avenues to permanent residency for students.
These reforms would restore the International Student Program that existed before the 21st century.
Foreign students can help fund post-secondary institutions through premium tuition, contribute to cultural interchange, and absorb knowledge and skills to take back to their homeland along with fond associations for Canada.
Canada does not need to decide merely how many international students it wants. It needs to decide what it wants an international student program to do.
A restored International Student Program will serve as a key plank in Canada’s foreign aid and international relations instead of a source of cheap labour and an immigration shortcut.