Canadian Immigration Minister Marc Miller will make an announcement at 8:30 a.m. Monday morning that will impact international students.
According to our information, Ottawa wants to reduce the number of foreign students in three provinces in particular: Ontario, British Columbia and Nova Scotia.
For a week now, the immigration minister has been floating the idea of introducing a cap on the number of foreign students admitted to the country on temporary residency to ease pressure on housing demand.
After discussions with the affected provinces in December, which did not produce any results, Ottawa feels it has a duty to act.
Some provinces would refuse to tighten the screws on educational institutions that accept too many students compared to the capacity of the housing stock in the region in which they are located, but also on bogus institutions that abuse the immigration system for profit.
This is because these students represent a significant source of revenue for both educational institutions and the provinces that host them, as they pay tuition fees five times higher than permanent residents or Canadian citizens.
As ministers arrived in Montreal on Sunday for a cabinet meeting until Tuesday, Trudeau's deputy for Quebec, Pablo Rodriguez, said the government needed to focus on pressures brought on by foreign students and temporary workers.
“Very constructive” letter from François Legault
Pablo Rodriguez was also asked to respond to the Quebec premier's recent letter to his federal counterpart, in which he specifically called on him to stem the flow of asylum seekers.
I found Mr Legault's letter, we found it very constructive and also very useful. “Now it’s up to us to find solutions together,” said Mr. Rodriguez.
In his letter, Prime Minister Legault claims that the number of asylum seekers arriving in Quebec is too high and that the situation has become so untenable that the province is on the verge of collapse.
On Friday, data released by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada confirmed that Quebec received 65,570 asylum applications in 2023, or 45.5% of all asylum applications received in the country, while the province's demographic weight is 22.1%.
With information from Louis Blouin and The Canadian Press