Well guess what?? More Students!!
In view of uncertainty due to travel restrictions for international students, Canada has announced new flexible measures to facilitate them.
- Students can study online from abroad until April 30, 2021, with no time deducted from the length of a future PGWP, as long as 50% of their program of study is eventually completed in Canada
-Students enrolled in a program that is 8-12 months in length, with a start date from May to September 2020, can complete their entire program online from abroad and still be eligible for a PGWP
- Students who have enrolled in a program with a start date between May to September 2020 and study online up to April 30, 2021, and who graduate from more than one eligible program of study, may be able to combine the length of their programs of study when they apply for a PGWP in the future, as long as their total studies are completed in Canada
For more background on this, my understanding (not all of which I am 100% certain on):
-the sense of the above is that international students have additional flexibility to complete
part of their Canadian study programs online and still be eligible for the post-graduate work experience. This will mean fewer international students 'need' to physically be present in Canada.
-from participation in a webinar from one embassy immigration section: they are
not issuing student visas for students whose study will be entirely online (at least for the moment). (Mostly I believe this applies to new students but obviously there is likely some variance).
-another announcement they made is a two stage student visa approval process, an 'approval in principle' to be used now to study online at a Canadian institution, with final approval to come later (presumably when covid travel restrictions are lifted). The IRCC rep who spoke was quite blunt that the approval in principle is not a guarantee the student visa will be issued in future; student applicants / parents were quite clearly distressed at the answer that if visa is not issued in future, they effectively lose out on tuition (at least in sense they won't be able to complete studies in Canada, I supposed they will have partial credits or get refunds, but the prospect of disruption to education is scary to many.
No-one should rely on this info to make decisions about studies, that is discussed in the student visas forum here. But my point is that it is false to claim that all other applicants and particularly students are being favoured over family class applicants; these measures will reduce the number of visas issued and processed, not increase. To me, the quite clear message to new students/applicants is "don't come now, maybe you can come later, and if you apply for a student visa, it's wait and see" (at least for programs that are online, which applies to many, many university and college programs).