Canada’s ‘Student Trafficking’ Industry Is Backfiring on Trudeau
A post-Covid explosion in foreign students has resulted in housing shortages and flawed academic programs being taught in strip malls. The immigration minister is blunt: “People are being exploited.”
Students walk on campus at Cape Breton University in Sydney, Nova Scotia.
Photographer: Darren Calabrese/BloombergCanada’s radical immigration experiment, which has given it one of the world’s fastest rates of population growth, has run into big trouble in the ring of suburbs and small cities around Toronto.
A post-pandemic surge of international students is causing prices for rental housing to soar and placing a spotlight on the uncontrolled growth of colleges that, according to the government’s own immigration minister, are taking advantage of vulnerable young people with inferior academic programs. Much of the blame is falling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who oversaw a tripling in the number of foreign students to more than 1 million. Today, about 1 in 40 people in the country is on a foreign-study visa.