The end of the high-value economy
The end of the high-value economy
Canada used to want to beat the world. Now it wants the world to walk our dogs.
A study-abroad company called Edvoy in Chennai, India offers all kinds of advice for students hoping to study in the UK, Canada, the US or elsewhere. I found Edvoy when I was looking online for information about the jobs and wages available to international students in Canada. Turns out a very large number of students outside Canada have the same questions. So Google assumed I was a student looking for work in Canada, rather than a pundit, and returned many job-hunting tips.
Edvoy even has an article about “6 high paid part-time jobs in Canada for international students.” It’s apparently written by a freelance writer in Ireland. Here are the jobs he’s found:
We are going to go on a bit of a stroll today, so before I go further I should emphasize that I see nothing wrong with students from anywhere taking jobs as baristas or dog walkers. I think jobs at pubs or with Uber are a valuable part of the international student experience, and I congratulate Edvoy for their success in connecting young people with Canada’s community colleges and its gig-worker economy.
But surely all this is useful context for the news that Sean Fraser was told in 2022, while he was immigration minister, that removing the 20-hour weekly cap on work international students could perform would “detract from the primary study goal of international students… circumvent the temporary foreign worker programs and give rise to further program integrity concerns with the international student program." With that information in hand, Fraser took the 20-hour cap off anyway.
That’s because Fraser attached more value to the first thing the memo said, which was that increasing hours worked would help alleviate labour shortages. In other words, immediate post-COVID Canada was a place where the big problem was the limited number of people available to work. Bringing in more international students was a quick way to address that, and letting them work nearly full-time would help too.
Ontario became Ground Zero for the rapid increase in enrolment for college students. That’s because Ontario premier Doug Ford was transfixed with what he called a “historic labour shortage” and eager to attract more people to the province — from other provinces, from outside Canada, seriously, wherever. I was told at the time that when Ford and Justin Trudeau met soon after the 2022 elections in Ontario and Quebec returned the incumbents, the PM bonded with Ford by complaining about Quebec’s François Legault behind Legault’s back, because Legault was still trying to limit immigration while Ford wanted the roof blown off.
A certain creative laxity in international-student visa distribution permitted the overlap between Ford’s interests, Trudeau’s and those of Ontario’s community colleges: Ford could address his labour shortage, at least at the lower end of the skills ladder (I assume international students are often highly skilled and eager to increase their human capital, but in the meantime they’re dog walkers). Trudeau could goose the economy during a shaky period when a lot of people were worried about the prospects of recession. And Ontario’s colleges could enjoy a revenue bonanza, at a time when most other sources of funding for Ontario higher education are capped. Alex Usher’s been covering that part all along. He wrote nine months ago:
Provincial and federal governments are both under intense pressure to do something about runaway housing costs – in particular, rental housing. Obviously, the long-term answer is more housing construction. But in the short term, the feds have very few levers available to them. One of those levers is international student visas. Do not be surprised if those get capped one day because of the blind lust for dollars that Ontario colleges are collectively displaying with respect to international students.
Good call.
Marc Miller has since arrived at the job of immigration minister to confirm that the things Fraser was warned about have happened. And Pierre Poilievre has made housing availability his biggest weapon against the Liberals. So Miller is capping international-student study permits for two years. This deprives a lot of higher-education institutions, including the vast majority that had no intention of gaming the system, deprived of the only source of revenue that had any prospect of growing over the medium term.
I’m conscious of catching up to things that were obvious to other people. Tony Keller had a sharp column in the Globe at the beginning of the month, calling out the visa bubble for reasons similar to mine:
Instead of a visa student program that maximizes tuition income, attracts the world’s brightest, raises the quality of Canadian education, fills gaps at the high end of the labour market and boosts the Canadian economy, we’ve built a visa monster that is largely doing the opposite. We’re selling the right to fill low-skill and low-wage jobs, under the guise of education, which is harming the economy and perverting our educational institutions.
To which I guess the question that comes to mind is: What else is new?
My column last week on the Bell Media cuts was a grab bag and different readers took away different things. I mentioned the bit where members of the Trudeau government plead with large companies for favours, but I probably could have landed on that part harder. When the finance minister says she’d “like to see more Canadian businesses investing more in Canada,” the industry minister calls American grocers and asks them to expand into Canada, and the prime minister shouts at Bell for laying off journalists, it’s all the damnedest thing. None of them is doing anything wrong. Corporations benefit from no presumption of innocence. All of us get to complain, including our leaders.
But the government is clearly also expressing extreme frustration.
I think they’d like to be presiding over a high-skills, high-wage, knowledge-intensive economy, capital-intensive and world-beating. In fact, I think they believed for a long time that they would. And now they’re realizing that their remaining time in office (even supposing an improbable reversal in the polls) is shorter than the time elapsed up til now. And they’re surveying what they have to show for it, and it’s terrible.