Calgary graduate students ‘fearful’ after feds slash Canada immigration targets – LiveWire Calgary
Feel good about your information and become a local news champion today
Many graduate students at the University of Calgary are international students
International graduate students at the University of Calgary are fearful for their future after the federal Liberal government made sweeping changes to federal immigration laws on Thursday.
According to a Thursday news release, the federal government will reduce permanent resident targets to 395,000 in 2025 compared to 500,000 in last year’s plan. The government will also reduce permanent resident targets to 380,000 in 2026 and 365,000 in 2027, which will reduce temporary resident volumes to five per cent of Canada’s population by the end of 2026.
The government said the Canada immigration reductions are part of a series of changes that aim to freeze population growth, which includes a cap on international student permits and changes to eligibility requirements for temporary foreign workers. According to the federal government, Canada’s population reached 41 million in April this year and immigration accounted for almost 98 per cent of this growth in 2023.
However, the government said it still plans on transitioning more international students and workers who are already in Canada to permanent residents because they are skilled and educated and will continue to support the workforce and economy.
“Today’s announcement is the next step in our plan to address the evolving immigration needs of our country. While it’s clear our economy needs newcomers, we see the pressures facing our country, and we must adapt our policies accordingly,” said federal Immigration Minister Marc Miller in Thursday’s release.
“These changes will make immigration work for our country so that everyone has access to the quality jobs, homes and supports they need to thrive. We have listened to Canadians, and we will continue to protect the integrity of our system and grow our population responsibly.”
We’re going to significantly reduce the number of immigrants coming to Canada for the next two years. This is temporary — to pause our population growth and let our economy catch up.
We have to get the system working right for all Canadians.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Alberta Immigration Minister Muhammad Yaseen criticized the Canada immigration changes in a joint statement, saying it’s not enough.
“Alberta has a long history of welcoming newcomers, and we plan to maintain that reputation. However, the federal government’s reckless and irresponsible open-border immigration policies, permitting almost 2 million newcomers to enter Canada last year alone, have led to unsustainable financial pressures on all provinces,” the joint statement read.
“With the cost of food, energy, housing and everything else in this country increasing, and with tens of thousands of new people moving to Alberta monthly, our hospitals and schools are at or above capacity. As a province, we need a reprieve from this explosive population growth so we can catch up with these pressures. So do all provinces. The federal government’s plan to cut a mere 105,000 new permanent residents will not solve these pressures when they are bringing in almost 2 million additional people annually.”
But the University of Calgary Graduate Students’ Association (UCGSA) said the new Canada immigration targets will affect a lot of international students who make up the bulk of the university’s graduate programs.
In a statement on Oct. 10, the UCGSA called the new Canada immigration rules “short-sighted” and an “attack on Canada’s innovation ecosystem.”
Alexandria Poppendorf, the UCGSA’s vice-president academic and an international PhD student, said she is afraid that she will have to leave the country after spending years laying down roots and being committed to her research. A lot of international graduate students also came here with their families and had to leave everything behind to move to Canada to study.
Poppendorf said almost 80 per cent of PhD students at the University of Calgary are international students.
“I feel as though within higher education and post-secondary … It’s bearing the responsibility for problems with that are so much more complex like the temporary foreign worker program, and I think that the government is really using a sledgehammer to do what needs to be done instead of a scalpel to address some of these more complex issues,” Poppendorf told LiveWire Calgary in an interview.
“It’s very worrying, and it’s sending a message that Canada is not the place to come for higher education, and that’s manifesting itself in lower enrolment rates.”
Both international and domestic graduate students are also facing increasing pressures related to wage stagnation and higher costs of living.
Hunter Yaworski, UCGSA’s vice president external, said many graduate students are housing and food insecure. Tuition at the University of Calgary has also gone up two years in a row and will go up again for international course-based students, he said.
Wages for teaching and research assistants have not increased for many years, Yaworski added. While some faculties saw a nominal increase in their funding packages, others like the faculty of arts have a minimum funding package of around $10,000 for the academic year. The starting pay for research assistants is also only $18 an hour.
“Overall, things are just getting more expensive, and it’s really restrictive on graduate students, especially because we haven’t seen any increases to our minimum funding or to our pay for many, many years at this point,” he told LWC.
Many international graduate students will consider leaving the University of Calgary and finishing their research in their home countries, especially if the programs are better funded. Poppendorf listed the United States and the European Union as examples where there are clearer funding practices for graduate students.
“I know students are suffering academically because of all these, these financial pressures, and then just the psychological pressures for international students, particularly of with the changes to the [post-graduate work permits] … So I think that’s really impacting people’s decisions, and it is influencing some to just go home and leave their programs early,” Poppendorf said.
International students also don’t have as many scholarship opportunities and they often receive less funding compared with domestic students, Yaworski said. Currently, there is only one major federal scholarship that international students are eligible for, and that did not get adjusted for inflation this academic year.
“There’s some really massive financial barriers, like international students can’t apply for tri-council scholarships as far as I know. There’s some recent changes, but that’s a massive barrier to access. I can get access to $40,000 to $27,000 scholarships, and international students can’t,” Yaworski added.
The University of Calgary declined LWC’s request for comment, saying it did not hear back from key people in relation to this issue.
Both Yaworski and Poppendorf said the lack of funding for graduate programs, wage stagnation and the rising cost of living will have “irreparable damages” to post-secondary education in Canada. If schools don’t support graduate students who are often helping teach lectures, helping with labs, supporting students and grading papers, less and less people are going to enrol in graduate programs.
“It’s really, really difficult to be giving it your all into being the best teaching assistant, research assistant, or as a researcher when you get a minimum funding package of [$20,000] which barely covers rent and you have to work on the side to try to make it up. If that doesn’t get rectified, we’re going to see decreases in the quality of education at post-secondary systems,” Yaworski said.
“We’re going to see decreases in the quality of research produced at these institutions, and we’re ultimately going to see, you know, governments, different levels of government, justify cuts to university budgets because of that, and will it will lead to some very, very serious damage to post-secondary and academics in Canada.”
Poppendorf said Canada is particularly vulnerable to brain drain because universities are responsible for research and development. If funding for research and development is stymied, there won’t be spaces to innovate research and development which will negatively impact the country’s economy.
“It’s a crisis point, and I don’t think that the federal government and provincial governments fully appreciate the role that higher education plays in a vibrant economy, and how these decisions are impacting that role and impacting the ability of the universities to fulfill that role,” she said.
Both UCGSA executives also want Calgarians and all levels of government to remember that graduate students are also working professionals and fill important roles at post-secondary institutions like the University of Calgary, who often feel underappreciated and unwanted because they aren’t paid enough for the work that they do.
“We are researchers. We are teachers. We are professionals. We are doing work. We are contributing to the knowledge economy of this country, but we’re also benefiting society by the research that we’re doing,” Yaworski said.
“We’re not undergraduate students. We’re not in college just for an extra two years or four years. We are adults, we have families … We do good work, and we’re not just taking courses and partying every night, although that would be fun.”
Yaworski and Poppendorf also want the university to take into consideration how precarious academia can be. Students are angry and upset, they said, and they often don’t have food security or able to find affordable housing. If a student misses a paycheck or do not get a teaching assistant contract for one academic year, they could be homeless or starving.
“When you’re in higher education spaces long enough, you’ll at some point hear an older faculty member say, ‘Well, this is how it was when I was going through my program.’ But I think we need to acknowledge that we are in a cost-of-living crisis. $20,000 in 1980 and with the tuition rates at the time is very different from $20,000 now with tuition increases,” Poppendorf said.
“That’s what happens when you get into these institutions, is sometimes you forget that the world around us is also changing and in crisis economically.”
Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.
Continue reading
