For the past few weeks, the university and college world and several elected officials in the country have been reacting strongly, with good reason, to the abnormally high rate of refusal of study permits for international students from Africa.
Indeed, in recent years, many permit applications, processed by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, have been refused for often incomprehensible reasons and have required abnormally long delays. How can we understand, for example, that graduate students, who nevertheless have scholarships guaranteed by their establishment and a good compliance record, can see their visa application refused? Isn’t there an implicit bias on the part of the officer responsible for their assessment, convinced of their intention not to leave Canada once their study permit has expired?
Even more disturbing is the fact that applications from students from French-speaking African countries are rejected in greater numbers than those from other countries. This situation is deplorable in more ways than one. It deprives African youth of enriching experiences and training within our universities, and our bilingual and French-speaking universities and colleges of the excellence of a generation of French-speaking leaders.
The House of Commons Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration recently took up this issue. The testimonies and reports tabled, in particular by the University of Ottawa, have highlighted the strategic importance of the presence of these students, not only for the financial health of post-secondary educational institutions, but also for the overall labor market in Canada.
With an international student community of nearly 10,000 people from 147 countries, who now represent nearly 21% of its student population, the University of Ottawa has experienced a spectacular increase (by 350%) in the number of its international students registered in its 450 programs from 2011 to 2021. For the same period, the number of international students registered in a program in French has more than quintupled, now representing 25% of the total population of French-speaking students by language of use. This success makes us proud and bears witness to international recognition of our know-how and the quality of our university project. The presence of these students within our community is a source of diversity and cultural enrichment and demonstrates our ambition to build a university community of convergence.
For the University of Ottawa, the abnormally high rate of study permit refusals reveals a lack of fairness and above all a lack of coherence in federal policies. Canada’s International Education Strategy (2019-2024), which aims to make Canada one of the world’s leading learning destinations and to diversify the source of international students, oddly relies on recruiting these same students. Yet this is not possible without true system-wide coherence and coordination not only within the federal government itself (Global Affairs Canada, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, Employment and Social Development Canada, etc.), but also with the provinces and territories.
A system to review
Bilingual and francophone universities and colleges across the country are being hit hard by these systemic barriers that require a complete overhaul of procedures and processes in our immigration system. However, faced with the immensity of the challenges of certain French-speaking communities here (shortage of skilled labour, intragenerational language transfers to English, decline in the demographic weight of French-speakers, etc.), welcoming students Africa opens a door to the future, while the average age of French-speaking Africa is around 20 years old and it is in this continent that we find the highest growth rate of French-speaking populations in the world.
Post-secondary institutions today must stand out from their traditional (American and British) and non-traditional (Asian) competitors, who prevail as benchmarks. We can regret this conception of higher education which contributes to competition, to varying degrees, between universities. But this is not incompatible with models of internationalization based on cooperation and co-construction. The circulation of knowledge and ideas must be accompanied by greater mobility of students and researchers. One does not go without the other. Universities open to the world must be able to accommodate the diversity of the world.
International students brought more than $22 billion to the Canadian economy in 2018 and supported more than 218,000 jobs, according to Global Affairs Canada. Welcoming and retaining these students provides universities and society as a whole with the means for their development and their influence. For the University of Ottawa, there is an important shift here that is now needed. The status quo is no longer an option and the federal government must act. And taking action sometimes means going back to the drawing board, so as to find ingenious solutions (the extension of the Direct component for studies (SDS) to several other African countries is a good example) which will allow Canada to remain a destination of first class on the world stage for all students, including those from French-speaking Africa.