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“The pace of immigration has changed and our immigration programs are facing new threats,” Immigration Minister Marc Miller told a news conference on Wednesday.

“We are facing an untenable number of people wishing to come to Canada. There’s a lot of people who want to come to Canada as a dream, but it is in fact a privilege, not a right.”

Canada’s population surpassed 41 million earlier this year, and the government has been partially blamed for not adapting quickly enough to adjust the immigration levels given the affordable housing crisis and rising cost of living, and straining public resources such as health care. 

Earlier this year, Ottawa imposed a 35 per cent reduction in new study permit applications processed and tightened rules to bring down temporary residents’ share of the overall population from the current 6.1 per cent to five per cent over three years.

While those measures appear to be working as international enrolment has dropped significantly this fall and some housing markets have reported a decline in rents, Miller said more changes are needed.

The additional measures announced on Wednesday include: 

•The study permit cap will be extended to cover international students enrolled in postgraduate programs, though 12 per cent of available spots will be reserved for this group:

•Anyone who applies for postgraduation work permits as of Nov. 1 must meet new language proficiency requirements under the Canadian language benchmarks, level 7 for university graduates and level 5 for their college peers:

•After Nov. 1, graduates of public college diploma programs will only be eligible for postgraduation work permits if their field of study is linked to labour market shortages in Canada;

•Later this year, work permit eligibility for spouses of international students will be restricted to spouses of master’s degree students enrolled in programs that are at least 16 months in duration;

•Open work permits will be limited to the spouses of highly skilled and specialized temporary foreign workers who are in management or professional occupations or in sectors with labour shortages. 

Miller said these measures are expected to reduce the number of temporary residents in Canada over three years, including 300,000 fewer international students, 175,000 fewer postgraduation work permit holders and 100,000 fewer foreign workers.

“It’s a delicate balancing act,” Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault said at the news conference. “We have a challenge of making sure we have enough people with the right skills to get the right training to fit into the jobs that are needed so we can grow the country.”

Under the previous measures to rein in numbers of foreign students, the post-secondary education sector said it has already experienced a decline in international enrolment this fall that’s larger than the 35 per cent cut Ottawa intended.

Many universities and colleges are already struggling to cut costs to make up the huge tuition revenue losses from international students, who generally pay three to four times what their domestic counterparts pay.

Universities Canada president and CEO Gabriel Miller said the further lowering of the cap will be another hit in the world’s confidence that the country wants to welcome the best and brightest, though now the sector will have clearer picture of the study permit targets for the next two years. 

The “off-the-cliff” international enrolment has already put the sector in a bind, and Ottawa and the provinces need to help support higher education, he said.

“Do we prefer to empower our universities to collect a bit more from students or do we prefer to put more public dollars in?” asked Miller, whose group represents 97 universities. 

“What’s not an option is this denial of financial reality that we’ve been living through in too many parts of the country.” 

However, Colleges Ontario president and CEO Marketa Evans said the new measures on caps and work permits clearly favour universities. She said the college system is the backbone in training a workforce to meet provincial and national labour needs.

“Ontario’s public college system cannot be cut off at the knees like this,” said Evans, whose organization represents 24 public colleges.

“With declining international students, and the resulting budgetary crunch, colleges will have to reduce program offerings or cancel them altogether, which means domestic students won’t have the chance to study in programs that are needed to address critical labour shortages.”

With the study permit caps, warned Evans, her members are projected to see a decline of at least $1.7 billion in revenue.

Barbara Jo Caruso, co-president of Canadian Immigration Lawyers Association, said her members were not surprised by the cuts to study permit intake because international students make up a huge chunk of the temporary resident population and work permit holders.

These further restrictive measures will make Canada less appealing to foreign students, and the changes to postgraduate work permits that take effect in November will significantly affect the students already enrolled, she said.

“It would be fair to have been making this announcement for something that would happen (to students) a year from now, as opposed to those that are already here,” said Caruso. “That shifts the issue to to how are they going to get themselves out of this.”

Mississauga-based immigration consultant Kanwar Sierah said many of the graduating international students will seemingly have no choice but to bribe employers for fake job offers for a shot to remain in Canada, now that the door for the postgraduate work permits is closed.

“What other options do they have?” asked Sierah. “Or what’s going to happen is that we are going to see the number of fraudulent refugee claims shoot up.”