B.C. Should Impose A Stricter Cap On International Student Enrolment

At a February 11^th campaign event focused on her party’s plan to make life more affordable for youth, Ontario Liberal leader Bonnie Crombie pledged to cap international student enrolment at a maximum of 10% per college or university. British Columbia should emulate this approach.

In explaining her reasoning for this policy, Crombie cut to the chase by exposing the shaky financial model that underlies much of Canada’s post-secondary system: “Right now what’s happening is they’re relying on foreign students to pay the bills, and that is not a sustainable model – in fact, that’s a Ponzi scheme”.

A Ponzi scheme is a form of investment fraud in which the fraudster promises a high rate of return for a non-existent enterprise, and must continually find new investors to keep the whole thing afloat. That sounds like a fairly accurate description of Canada’s international student program. 

Crombie went on to cite the fact that many international students struggle to find access to housing and healthcare. Once controversial, the contention that Canada’s housing and healthcare system are being overloaded by an unsustainable rise in foreign student admissions is now commonplace on all sides of the political aisle.

Here in B.C., the NDP government imposed a 30% international student enrolment cap for public post-secondary institutions last year.

While a limit of any kind is a welcome step in the right direction, B.C.’s cap still allows nearly a third of a school’s student body to be composed of foreign nationals – not a substantial reduction. B.C.’s enrolment cap also excludes private learning institutions, while Bonnie Crombie’s plan would place a cap on all schools.

B.C. needs to toughen its approach, particularly in light of recently released data from Statistics Canada that reveals the scope of this province’s out of control population growth. From 2021-2024, Surrey grew by +17.3%, Langley by +17.22%, Burnaby by +14.2%, Coquitlam by +12.02%, and Maple Ridge by +11.97%. In fact, out of the 16 B.C. municipalities with over 90,000 residents, only one saw a growth rate of less than 5% in the period from 2021-2024.

The negative consequences of this jaw-dropping population growth rate are starting to pile up, and are perhaps nowhere more visible than in Surrey, with its astonishing +17.3% increase in population.

In an interview with a reporter from the Vancouver Sun, Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke spoke out about how her community’s unsustainable population increase is putting a strain on housing, schools, transit, and healthcare. Locke described how Surrey Memorial Hospital, which has the busiest emergency room in Canada, is chock full: “If you’re under eight hours waiting time, that’s usually an OK day.

Locke paints a startling picture of a city under incredible strain: students attending school in shifts as classrooms overflow, constant “Sorry, this bus is full” signs, and illegal secondary suites cropping up to house new residents. The skyline of the city is also dramatically changing, as the swelling population fuels densification: “I’m looking out my window and I can tell you there was a day 20 years ago when I wouldn’t have counted any highrises. And now they’re popping up like flowers in the spring”.

While these problems are most pronounced in Surrey, all major communities in B.C. – and many smaller ones, too – have experienced the strain of population growth as of late. It might be convenient for the province to offload the responsibility of controlling population growth to Ottawa, but the fact is that immigration is a shared federal-provincial jurisdiction.

There are tools available to cool the jets on B.C.’s population growth, if the NDP government has the political will to use them – and foremost among these tools would be emulating Bonnie Crombie’s proposal to cap international student enrolment at 10% across all post-secondary institutions.