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<\/p>\nFor years, the stories of the overseas sacrifices that were made to fuel Ontario\u2019s international student boom have been told.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Families in poor countries that sold their few worldly possessions, sometimes the actual farm, to pay the steep college tuition costs for foreign students in the land of milk and honey. Often, they found the education and opportunity were not at all what they expected.<\/p>\n
But now comes the perhaps inevitable other end of that story, with news this week that the Doug Ford government is placing Conestoga College, in the province\u2019s southwest, under administration after an audit found what it called \u201cnumerous egregious financial decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n
The allegations of misspending are comically ridiculous. There was a 55 per cent salary increase for John Tibbits, a former president, and a severance package for the same fellow that totalled 83 times his monthly salary. (The Waterloo campus of the college is now named for Tibbits. Perhaps they should have considered a triumphal arch?) The government also pointed to a $23,000 trip to Italy for three \u2014 three! \u2014 senior staff and a $1,300 staff meal of which more than half was spent on alcohol.<\/p>\n
While many of Ontario\u2019s colleges were gorging themselves on the fat tuition expenses they brought in during the spiking international student enrolment a few years ago, Conestoga was the biggest eater at the feast.<\/p>\n
It increased foreign enrolment by almost 150 per cent from 2021 to 2023, nearly tripling its total revenue over a three-year period. You can see why the purse strings might have been a little loose.<\/p>\n
But it wasn\u2019t alone. Dozens of Ontario colleges had huge jumps in international students and, crucially, almost none of them built any kind of housing for the new arrivals. These were community colleges, after all. The whole idea was that housing students wasn\u2019t their thing since they normally lived locally in the first place.<\/p>\n
The boom has, of course, since gone bust. The federal Liberals belatedly capped international student visas two years ago, realizing far too late that the growth allowed during COVID-era labour shortages had exacerbated the housing crisis, increased rents, and tightened the post-pandemic labour market, particularly for young people. (The foreign students were often victims themselves, finding out only after arrival that housing was scarce and costs were high.)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Dozens of Ontario colleges had huge jumps in international students and, crucially, almost none of them built any kind of housing for the new arrivals.<\/p>\n
Incoming foreign student enrolment has since nosedived, especially since Ottawa made it harder to get a post-degree work permit for those who study in Canada, and colleges like Conestoga have had to cut courses and slash staff as revenues have plummeted.<\/p>\n
The situation at Conestoga, from sloshing around in money to being put under administration, only underscores how bizarre it was that this situation was allowed to persist as long as it did.<\/p>\n
Sean Fraser, the federal Justice Minister who was in charge of immigration during much of the foreign-student boom, told the CBC this week that. \u201cWith the benefit of hindsight, I would have liked to actually change the program fundamentally and say the federal government is placing a cap on this.\u201d<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t say.<\/p>\n
But the Liberals in Ottawa weren\u2019t the only guilty party. The provinces did request an influx of potential workers during the pandemic, and then no one seemed to realize that the huge increases in foreign students in post-secondary institutions were not going to address those labour shortages, since they were largely in low-paying, unskilled jobs. The kind that didn\u2019t require a college degree, in other words.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the federal Auditor General issued a report this week that said immigration officials made little to no effort to investigate fraud within the student visa program, saying that they were overwhelmed by the large numbers.<\/p>\n
More than 150,000 such cases were identified in 2023 and 2024 alone, with many of them flagged to the department because visa holders might not have been following the requirements of their study permits, as can happen when they do not attend classes, for example. A tiny fraction of those cases were even investigated, and in almost half of those that were, the student in question did not respond to inquiries from immigration officials.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It is, in sum, a hot mess.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Opposition politicians in Ontario sought to pin most of the blame this week on the Ford government, saying the Progressive Conservatives\u2019 2019 tuition freeze forced the post-secondary sector to look abroad for needed funds. \u201cNow communities, workers, and students are dealing with the fallout while the government tries to act like this is all someone else\u2019s fault,\u201d said NDP MPP Catherine Fife, who represents Waterloo, after the Conestoga news was announced. \u201cWhat did they think was going to happen?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a fair question, but as was the case when the Ford government took over various public school boards after allegations of lavish expense mishaps, Conestoga College at this moment in time does not make a particularly sympathetic victim.<\/p>\n
Mostly it stands as a symbol of a truly wild time in the post-secondary education sector in Ontario, when a lot of people who were supposed to be minding the store were doing the opposite.<\/p>\n
And a time that a considerable number of politicians, at multiple levels, would rather we all forget.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For years, the stories of the overseas sacrifices that were made to fuel Ontario\u2019s international student boom have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38381,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[16498,17,16495,16493,4079,7884,16494,16497,16496],"class_list":{"0":"post-38380","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-canada","8":"tag-brian-thompson","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-conestoga","11":"tag-conestoga-college","12":"tag-doug-ford","13":"tag-international-student","14":"tag-john-tibbits","15":"tag-labour-shortages","16":"tag-student-visa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}