The Ontario government and its public colleges are both sounding the alarm over an impending labour shortage as the impact of a cap on international students begins to bite in the province’s post-secondary sector.
At the beginning of the year, as part of a plan to cut the number of temporary residents, the Trudeau government brought in a strict cap on the number of international students colleges and universities could accept.
While Ontario’s 44 post-secondary institutions continue to study the impacts of the reduction, colleges say the volume of students has already dropped after the initial cut in enrolment.
“We’ve definitely seen the impact of that,” Marketa Evans, president and CEO of Colleges Ontario, told Global News. “In September of this past year, the international student enrolment at Ontario colleges is about half of what it was in September of last year.”
The federal cap is set to become tighter still next year, when Canada issues 437,000 study permits, down 10 per cent from the 485,000 permits issued in 2024.
The substantial drop has left colleges fighting two separate battles: looking to maintain their financial health, while continuing to provide enough graduates to fill vacancies in Ontario’s labour markets.
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The latter concern appears to be top of mind for the Ford government’s recently-appointed Minister of Colleges and Universities, Nolan Quinn.
“We’re more worried about the labour market,” Quinn told Global News. “There’s labour market shortages whether it’s in STEM, health care, skilled trades.”
He added, “We need to focus on the labour market and labour market needs, that’s our most pressing issue.”
At an event at Humber College on Thursday, Premier Doug Ford highlighted the provincial need according to his government’s estimates.
“Over the next decade we’re going to need more than 500,000 additional workers in skilled trades-related occupations, including 100,000 workers in construction sector alone,” he said, highlighting the province’s $190-billion infrastructure capital plan over the next decade.
Colleges Ontario calls it puzzling that the provincial and federal priorities are misaligned.
“We’re spending so much energy and effort to grow the electric vehicle and batter plant sector in Ontario but no human power to put behind it,” Evans said. “In fact we’re cutting that talent pipeline just as folks need it the most.”
While Evans is emphatic that the biggest issue coming from the international student cap will be for the labour market in Ontario, it also marks a financial challenge for many colleges.
A panel convened by the Ford government to study the financial health of the post-secondary sector before the cap came in found that it was overly reliant on international students and needed a cash infusion of $2.5 billion from the province.
The expert group, formed in March 2023, concluded the Ford government’s 10-per cent tuition cut and subsequent freeze in 2019, combined with historic underfunding of post-secondary education, posed a “significant threat” to the viability of the sector.
Earlier this year, after the international student cap was announced, the government rolled out $1.3 billion in financial support for the sector, including a focus on efficiencies.
Evans said the money was an interim measure while colleges continued to adjust to the sector, with around 11 colleges dipping into a specific efficient fund.
“As we said at the time, a really good first step to ensure some immediate stability for the sector, while we were working things out,” Evans said.
“A lot of those measures are two, three-year measures and we sort of see that as a bridge to a broader conversation around what financial stability is going to look like once the dust settles on where things are at with the other revenue sources.”
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