Trudeau says he could have acted faster on immigration changes, blames ‘bad actors
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There's a whole industry of shady consultants and marketers pushing some of these things, including fake documents.
That doesn't excuse the federal government - they should've expected this.
I blame others like some of the provinces (who used international fees to avoid funding universities and colleges). And some of the colleges went WAY overboard expanding for international students and offering them fairly useless degrees (without building housing, too); some students bought into it because of the implicit promise of getting permanent residency status.
But again: the feds should have expected (they know from experience!) that fraud in the immigration system happens. They put the priority on more numbers and not checks and balances.
Plenty of blame to go around.
Would add corrupt businesses who charge for closed work permit holders or for LMIA job offers. Provinces didn’t do anything about the degree mills and allowed private colleges to offer public degrees. Municipalities ignored illegal and unsafe rental housing knowing many were exploiting a vulnerable population and that many were not declaring the income.
I'd add there was some serious influence lobbying/donations to politicians from the private colleges and even some public ones/degree mills and related entities. Ontario especially - cut public funding (Ontario higher education spending is lowest of all provinces) which flattered the budget, and opening the international students gate wide - well, all the hogs headed straight for the trough, telling the provinces it was all great and free money from abroad. Colleges especially spent lots of money expanding some of their weakest and least demanding programs (easiest to expand quickly).
Again - still, the feds took too long to introduce measures to stop the outright fraud (fake acceptances/invitations).
But the problems were NOT limited to fake acceptances. A lot of the 'real' acceptances were to dodgy and marginal institutions and programs.
Can’t forget they were WARNED about letting Mexico just have ETAs . WARNED internally. Tens of thousands of asylum claims costing taxpayers millions to process .
Actually looking forward to when Trump gets in . He’s going to chew up & spit out Trudeau
As a Canadian last thing you should be happy about is Trump in office no matter who is in power at any level of government.
There is lots of blame to go around and for short term gain of a few we will be paying for years if not decades as a country.
There are indeed many bad actors, and much blame to go around.
But Ontario's colleges have a special place in this, and the people behind it deserve a special type of blame. The Globe has a piece today:
-Ontario colleges went from having about 12% international students to almost 42% - in less than ten years!
-The next-highest degree of reliance was BC - at only 24%.
I don't have the figures for international students in Ontario universities but have found several mentions that the growth in international students was to a large degree in the colleges. I'm going to guess that international students didn't grow to over 20% (from 13% a decade or so ago) - it was only 16% in 20-21 study year.
And keep in mind: international students in Ontario (Ontario alone) are about half of all international students in Canada.
So when we say the experience of too many international students in dodgy college programs - the part that almost all of the stories about Canada having too many foreign students focus on - it is predominantly a story about what happened in Ontario.