The Canadian Immigration Ministry has proposed additional regulations for foreign students that include raising the reporting requirements for compliance, suspending noncompliant institutions, and extending employment limits.
The international student program may see a number of regulation modifications as suggested by Canada’s immigration minister. The new regulations mandate more compliance reporting from Canadian institutions and schools. They are available for review and comment for 30 days.
The principal modifications consist of:
> giving the government the power to halt the issuance of study permits for universities that don’t comply.
> requiring students who are moving to another school to reapply for their study permits.
>raising the weekly cap on off-campus work to 24 hours while pursuing a degree from 20 hours.
The primary focal point pertains to the expanded authority for suspension and compliance reporting granted to the ministry. This has to do with Canada’s federal-provincial authority split.
Provinces and Territories (PTs) and the Ministry share responsibility for the management of the International Student Programme (ISP). The ministry is in charge of determining whether to grant an application for a study permit, making rules governing the entry of foreign students into Canada, and outlining the requirements that holders of study permits must fulfill while there.
The province or territory must designate DLIs (Designated Learning Institutions) in accordance with a set of criteria that the province or territory and the ministry have mutually agreed upon before they can accept overseas students. PTs additionally establish requirements that DLIs must fulfill in order to be recognized by their respective authorities.
When an institution has to be added or deleted from the public DLI list, which lists all the universities authorized to accept students in a particular province or territory, PTs notify the ministry.
The ministry is essentially taking on a bigger responsibility for DLI oversight (and penalizing) under the proposed regulations than it did before. The ministry presents the change as an issue of program integrity that aims to resolve the three problems listed below:
1) The compliance program and letter of acceptance verification mechanism do not grant the federal government the regulatory authority to require reporting from DLIs. The ministry is unable to identify phony acceptance letters in cases where DLIs are not reporting.
2) A non-compliant DLI cannot be subject to restrictions by the ministry, such as the suspension of the study permit application procedure. This implies that even in cases when the DLI does not report on student enrollment status or take part in the letter of acceptance verification mechanism, the ministry is still required to grant study permits to students enrolled there.
3) International students are not required by the ministry to inform the Department of any changes to their DLIs. Because of this, when a student switches DLIs, the ministry is unable to verify attendance and compliance with the study permit, which increases the possibility of the study permit cap being broken.
The regulations mandate that post-secondary DLIs provide reports, and they give the ministry the authority to halt the processing of study permits for DLIs that do not comply for a maximum of 12 months in a row.
The ministry comes to the conclusion that the regulation changes would enable it to deal with frequent instances of unethical activity that compromise the program’s integrity and effectively respond to integrity problems. The ministry would be able to confirm each LOA included with study permit applications before they are processed thanks to the improved LOA verification mechanism.
Closing the compliance gap in the current regime would entail codifying the requirement to produce biannual compliance reports. In order to guarantee accurate assessment and tracking of student compliance with permit criteria, it would be necessary for international students to obtain a new study permit when transferring to a different DLI.
The proposed regulation modifications come after major policy shifts in Canada, such as the imposition of a cap on international enrollment and modifications to the rights of post-study workers. They also coincide with a significant increase in the number of foreign students studying in Canada, which at the end of 2023 surpassed a million, up roughly two-thirds over the preceding five years.