Caps on international students and limits on work visas will have a “significant impact” on Ottawa’s hospitality and tourism industry, says the president and CEO of Algonquin College.
According to Claude Brulé, having fewer international students studying in Ottawa will have a number of consequences for businesses and potentially for the students themselves.
Earlier this year, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) made changes to the Post-Graduation Work Permit program (PGWP) that saw eligibility move from being based on years of study to specific labour markets.
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IRCC plans to continue to allow eligibility to students graduating from agriculture; health; science, technology, engineering and math (STEM); construction/trades; and transportation.
“It’s having an impact on our reputation abroad and our ability to recruit. With this new ruling, there are sectors within our communities that will not have the same number of graduates that you once had in two areas in particular, the schools of business and the schools of hospitality and tourism,” Brulé said.
Nyle Kelly, manager of the Brookstreet Hotel on Legget Drive in Kanata, says the caps will affect five to 10 per cent of his staff, or about 15 employees.
“It’ll reduce (our staff) by 10 per cent, so it’s not a massive impact, but it will affect us. If they don’t allow the (number of) foreign students to grow, then that will have a larger impact over time,” Kelly said.
Brulé says the IRCC made a list of close to 1,000 programs of study across Canada that will continue to have access to the PGWP program – a list that many Algonquin programs are not on.
“Of all the programs we offer at the college, 65 per cent of our programs are not on that list and 60 per cent of our overall international student enrolment was in those 65 per cent of programs,” Brulé told OBJ.
The federal government chose markets with national impact in mind, rather than provincial or regional, he added.
Brulé said Algonquin, along with the Ministry of Education, Colleges Ontario, and Colleges and Institutes Canada are advocating to the federal government to rethink its decisions on what labour markets are eligible.
“Our ministry in Ontario has worked with our sector to analyze the impact of those decisions and provide a rationale for why they should include more programs,” he said.
In a statement from College Ontario urging the federal government to rethink its approach, Marketa Evans, president and CEO, said that with more than 16,000 international students currently enrolled in programs that support the tourism and hospitality industry, smaller communities that rely on that sector are at risk.
“Our view is that we should all be working together to enhance the pipeline of talent for high-demand sectors, rather than arbitrarily cutting talent off as the current federal approach does … The federal government has not worked with the province to develop a list of post-secondary programs that accurately reflects Ontario’s workforce needs. This means several glaring omissions exist,” Evans said in the statement.
Other recent changes to international student work visas include increasing the number of hours students can work off-campus from 20 to 24 hours weekly, while their classes are in session.
Kelly says that, despite the change, the limits put on the number of hours international students can work per week hinders both the students and the businesses they work for.
“That has an effect on training those employees and bringing them up to speed and having them fulfil their shifts,” Kelly said.
Kelly added that there’s no workaround to the possible absence of international students from the workforce, things will simply just become more difficult.
“We will simply be recruiting more, being more flexible with additional part-time staffing, and we may have to take on more part-time partners for the hotel. There’s not necessarily a game plan. The hospitality industry has a hard time finding labour in general and it will be difficult to find the number of staff that we need,” he said.
Brulé says the impacts of these changes will be felt at Algonquin College as well as the broader Ottawa community.
“International students come to get a stellar education with us, but they also desire to have the opportunity to gain work experience afterward. Without that, it’s much less attractive to come and study with us,” he said.
