The icky truth about international students in Canada

Opportunistic Canadian training institutes that over-promise and under-deliver are no doubt a problem for international students in Canada. The BC government's pledge this week to get to the bottom of that could be helpful.

But if we're thinking it's just Bob's Shady Career College for Suckers that's the problem, take a look at the tuition fees that mainstream universities are charging for international students. 

It helps explain why so many people seem to be freaking out at a shift in the political winds around international students.

It's not because anyone's got a big heart for shielding international students from a shoddy education, or keeping more spaces open for Canadian students. It's about post-secondaries and employers that have been dining out on foreign students for many years, and can't bear to give that up.

The Tyee had a great read on that earlier this month, appropriately headlined "Cash Cows and Cheap Labour." 

Not only do post-secondaries bring in far more money from foreign students than domestic students, the high cost of living in Canada ensures that those students will have to look for work while studying here. That's great news for employers looking to fill low-end jobs. 

Langara College Prof. Jenny Francis told the Tyee that after studying the issues for foreign students in Canada, she'd concluded that they are "the new temporary foreign worker, basically."

And while the provincial and federal governments seem to want to point the finger for exploitive tuition fees at "the diploma equivalent of puppy mills," they'd be wise to take a look at what the higher-status universities are up to as well.  

Let's start with the University of BC, where the cost of completing an undergraduate program is typically more than eight times higher for an international student than a domestic one. The Medical Laboratory Science program, for instance, costs $7,500 for a Canadian student, while a foreign student will shell out $61,000. 

Need an applied science degree in engineering? That'll be $15,000 if you're Canadian, and $60,000 if you're not. Same with a commerce degree. 

Not surprisingly, the number of international students at UBC climbed from 8,685 in the 2012-13 fiscal year to 17,040 in 2021-22. If one international student pays as much tuition as eight Canadians, who can say no?

At the University of Victoria, the per-credit cost is five times higher for international students than for domestic students - $1,981 compared to $411. At any point where there's an additional fee, international students pay much more for that as well: $990 to challenge a course as compared to $205; $1,500 to challenge a co-op work term versus $776. 

Even the mandatory acceptance fee that has to be paid just to get started at UVic is three times higher for foreign students, coming in at $750.

Clearly, the primary responsibility for figuring out whether you can afford to study in Canada has to reside with the foreign student. It's up to them to do their research and make sure they're not signing up with Bob's Shady Career College. It's up to them to bring a healthy level of distrust for any recruiter who makes it sound like studying in Canada is a ticket to permanent residency. (In BC, less than a third of foreign undergraduates land permanent residency within five years of graduating.)

But if foreign students feel like they're doing their best on all of that yet still feeling like there's some plot afoot to take advantage of them, they're right. 

Canada planned things to go exactly the way they're going. The use of foreign students as cash cows and cheap labour was all carefully laid out in the 2013 federal report, "International Education: A Key Driver of Canada's Future Prosperity." 

"We must recognize the immediate benefits of international education for Canada, which span economic growth, job creation, and increased exports and investment," noted the report. "These benefits are distributed across all of Canada, from coast to coast to coast."

And wow, did post-secondaries embrace the challenge. There were 239,000 international students in Canada at the time of that report, with a goal to double that by 2023. Instead, the number of students had quadrupled to a million by last year.

The Tyee notes a 2019 report to the BC government that highlighted the $3.5 billion in tuition fees that international students were bringing in that year. If they were an export commodity, said the report, they would be the third most valuable in the province, after fuel and timber.

Apparently a number of educators interviewed for the Tyee's story felt uncomfortable with that comparison. But that was exactly what our governments set out to do with the massive expansion in international students: Create cash cows and a new pool of cheap labour. 

I haven't seen anyone try to put an international-development-and-global-goodwill spin on any of this, and at least that's a relief. The only foreign students who could possibly afford these tuition fees come from wealthy families. Nobody's even pretending this is about supporting citizens from challenged countries toward a better future for themselves and their homeland. 

But trying to present this issue as being about "a few bad apples" is just plain wrong. We've been taking advantage of foreign students for at least a decade, and now we're a little embarrassed that we let it go this far. Just say it. 

Haters gonna hate - so don't give them the microphone

If Pierre Poilievre was just some random dude with a Twitter account and an uninformed opinion, we could just leave him to it and shrug off his ridiculous view that providing safe consumption sites and non-poisoned drugs for people "will only lead to their ultimate deaths."

Alas, he's not some random dude, he's a man who could actually end up being Canada's prime minister someday. 

So even when he tweets something stupid and wrong, the media pick it up and send it across the country. And the fact of that pickup gives his foolish musings weight among those who already hate any sensible conversation around drugs.

That particular group of people have controlled the illicit drug conversation for almost 70 years, if we want to start the clock at BC's landmark 1956 study of heroin use that largely concluded that harm reduction made a lot more sense than criminalizing users. At what point do the rest of us get to say hey, shuddup already?

BC's poisoned drug supply has killed 10,000 people in the last seven years. That's almost three times the number of deaths from motor vehicle accidents, homicides, suicides and fatal prescription drug overdoses combined. 

Meanwhile, years of careful record-keeping at Canada's safer-consumption sites give us all the proof needed to conclude that such sites save lives and connect people to services. Between 2017-20, some 2.2 million people used the sites and nobody died. 

As for whether a safer drug supply would save lives, of course it would. People are not dying by the thousands because they use drugs, they're dying because the drugs they use are poisoned. 

So why should Poilievre get even a millisecond of media attention for his completely ludicrous assertion that safer-consumption sites and a safer drug supply lead only to people's "ultimate deaths"? Why do the media allow him to "reignite the debate around safe supply," as the Global TV story puts it, by giving his tweet public profile as if he was actually saying something of substance?

Granted, the media did find people to refute Poilievre as they covered the "story" of his disparaging tweet. But the damage is done when you give the guy the top third of a story to spout his harmful nonsense.

Once upon a time, I would have imagined that right-minded people would see through Poilievre's tweet in an instant and that it would have as much impact as the guy sounding off behind me in the grocery store lineup about how COVID-19 is a government conspiracy. 

But in this post-Trump era, I know otherwise. Today's idiot statement can easily end up tomorrow's political policy, because now we are "populist" and prone to taking a shine to people who are as ill-prepared as any of us when it comes to effectively running a city, province or country. We like The Everyman, even when he's a dangerous liar from the privileged class playing the long con.

I relish some day in the distant future when Poilievre's words are seen as the hate speech that they really are, and when media reporting in garden-variety fashion on such blatant untruths is viewed as complicit in the spreading of that hate. 

Many more people will die because the tweet of a man given status as a future political leader will dampen political and public enthusiasm even more for taking action on what is surely one of the most outrageous, preventable tragedies of our times. It doesn't get more hateful than that. 

Justin Trudeau's stand on decriminalizing still a work in progress

 

  While I keep my distance from politics, I've somehow ended up on the federal Liberal email list and have been receiving messages urging me to donate to Justin Trudeau and seeking my thoughts. With the heartbreak of Bill C-36 and the further criminalizing of sex work hanging over me, I seized the opportunity to respond to one of the messages to feel out Trudeau's position on decriminalization. Here is our exchange so far.

My response to the Liberals' email asking for my thoughts:

I would like to see Justin Trudeau come out with a clear statement around decriminalizing the work of adult, consensual sex workers. I am a passionate activist on this issue of human and civil rights, and will support the candidate who supports an end to C36 and understands that decriminalization is the best way to reduce risk to sex workers, decrease stigma, and ensure civil equality to a population of workers who are discriminated against and silenced. 

Their response to me a few days later:

Dear Jody,

    Thank you for writing to us about the Conservatives’ recently proposed prostitution legislation, Bill C-36.

    The Liberal Party of Canada opposes this legislation. We have serious concerns that Bill C-36 fails to comply with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the requirements outlined by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Bedford decision. We are also concerned that this legislation fails to adequately protect the health and safety of vulnerable people, particularly women.

    We have called on the government to produce evidence of the legal opinions it sought in drafting this legislation, however, the Conservatives continue to refuse to release this information. They have also refused to submit this legislation as a reference to the Supreme Court of Canada in order to determine its constitutional validity.

    Given all of these concerns, we remain troubled the legislation will not actually make life safer for sex workers.

    Thank you again for contacting us on this important issue. It is through dialogue with Canadians like you that the Liberal Party of Canada can continue to develop policies that reflect the values of Canadians.

    Kind regards,

    James Cano
    Liberal Party of Canada

And my response back to them, sent today: 

    I really appreciate that someone took the time to respond to my query. However, I urge you to make your platform just a bit more specific around WHAT you will do for sex workers. For instance, I am unclear whether you would support decriminalization of adult, consensual sex work, or if you still like the idea of further criminalization but believe that C-36 isn't a good law for doing that. I feel this is one of the most important civil and human rights issues in our country right now, as tens of thousands of consenting adult sex workers work in the shadows without our support, without the same access to civil and criminal remedies such as police, courts, contract law, employment standards, workers' comp.  

    If the Liberals are looking for more information and research to help them take a firm position on this issue, here are some links that I think have great sources of information. The first is the site of a very large research project going on right now in Canada, which involves subjects who are connected to the sex work industry in a variety of ways. The second is the site of an organization I work with from time to time and am very closely tied to, Peers Victoria. The third is the site of Maggie's, a Toronto sex worker organization that has collected some excellent resources. The fourth is the site of Stella's, a Montreal sex worker organization. 

    There's so much more information I'd be happy to connect you to, from all around the world. This is an emotional issue, but the research around it is very clear. Nothing improves - for sex workers or the communities they live in - through criminalization. Yes, bad things happen to some sex workers, but how does any of that improve by criminalizing the work? The question is not whether we'd want our children to be sex workers (we activists are constantly having that question thrown at us), it's what kind of a work place and safety structure we'd want for them if they were doing this work. 

    Please take a clear stand on this issue as one of human and civil rights. The Liberals stand a very good chance of forming the next government. Be brave, humane and evidence-based, and support a decriminalized workplace for adult, consenting sex workers. 

http://www.understandingsexwork.com/

http://www.safersexwork.ca/sex-work-101/

http://maggiestoronto.ca/resources

http://chezstella.org/stella/en/publications

And what will they say next? Stay tuned. 

Canada looks better from a distance these days

    It appears that I may have developed an idealistic sense of Canada while I was off living in Honduras these last two years. I was thinking of it as a great country with a few problems it needed to pay attention to at the time I left Canada in early 2012, but perhaps the distance - and the contrast with super-troubled Honduras - led me to forget about the "pay attention" part and just remember it as a country that largely had its act together.
    At any rate, coming home and learning about some of the messed-up stuff that's actually going on in my homeland has been pretty discouraging..
     The stuff around sex work has been particularly unsettling, given my affinity for the people who the rest of us leave without rights, dignity or safe workplaces just because we wrinkle our noses at what they do for a living. It is so, so sad that we're preparing to go backwards with a law that will only make things worse for sex workers.
     But the video of the contaminated water pouring out of the huge Mount Polley mine tailings "pond" was another serious wakeup for anyone who thinks Canada's got it all figured out. I could hardly believe what I was seeing, that vast volume of poisoned water just pouring across the landscape. How was it possible, that we would allow a 170-hectare "pond" at a mine to be so poorly maintained that a breach of this size could happen?
    These kinds of things - stupid laws, the ignoring of environmental regulations - happen regularly in Honduras, of course. But while I wouldn't want to make excuses for any country, the truth is that the place is relatively new to democracy, poor as hell, badly educated for the most part and has a government style so hands-off and self-serving that it could have only been created by the most Republican of the U.S. Republicans that have influenced the country so heavily.
    But what's Canada's excuse? We're comparatively rich, our infrastructure is amazing, and our education system is like a golden dream to anyone from a developing country. We have been a democracy ever since we were born as a country, and at least in theory talk a good game about the importance of democratic processes and citizenship. We are very big on equality, and at times have been brilliant leaders on the world stage with our progressive attitudes and drive to be fair.
     Yet here we are, with a chance to do right on behalf of an underclass of sex workers that is largely female and contains the most stigmatized, misunderstood and discriminated-against  people in the country, and we are walking backwards - toward greater discrimination, higher risk of violence, deeper inequality. Is this my Canada?
     As for that haunting spill at the Mount Polley mine, the weird thing is that we've got tens of thousands of regulations in this country, including I don't know how many that would have something to do with not being allowed to leave your tailings pond to get in such disrepair that it might rupture all over the wilderness.  I bet most of us presumed the whole point of having so many laws around things like that was to ensure a day would never come when Canadians would have to see a massive lake of arsenic-contaminated water pouring across our landscape.
    And yet there it was. And yes, we can blame the government, as many people already are. But we citizens have been here the whole time that various federal and provincial governments were taking apart the regulatory bodies and stripping away the funding that used to ensure things like tailings ponds got monitored. We reelected the same kind of governments over and over again. We voted for governments that hated to govern, and it is just a little late to lament their failings now.
    Anyway. I guess it's just a reminder that no country is safe from bad law-making and stupid thinking (like that corporations could ever be left to monitor their own environmental impact, or that you could "help" sex workers by criminalizing their customers).
     I guess I started getting a little dreamy about Canada while I was away. I got thinking that while we admittedly stumble on some fronts, overall we were on the right path. But I'm back in the real world now.
   

Ideology is no way to run a country
Oct. 5, 2007

The problems of ideology-based governance clearly must be more obvious from afar. Otherwise, Canadians wouldn’t be able to bear the hypocrisy of railing against oppressive and backward regimes elsewhere in the world while committing ourselves anew to the folly of a “war on drugs.”
With news this week that we’re returning full-force to the same fruitless battle we’ve already lost several times over, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has once again reminded me why word of his 2006 election plunged me into a pit of despair.
Here we are one more time, at least 60 years after we first heard from the experts that we were doing things all wrong, talking about “crackdowns” and the need to “get tough” with those who use illicit drugs. Posturing about all the butt-does kicking we’ll be doing at the border once our new anti-drug strategy is in place. Planning the latest version of an earnest but pointless campaign to convince teenagers not to use drugs.
Small wonder I eventually lost my appetite for journalism when I think how many times I’ve witnessed this particular story cycle unfold. The real tragedy is that the misuse of drugs continues to cost us $40 billion a year in Canada in direct and indirect costs, and that’s not even counting all the billions we’ve thrown away on misguided and ideologically driven attempts to do something about that.
Here’s the thing: Health issues can’t be resolved through ideology.
For the most part, we understand that. You wouldn’t catch us scrapping radiation therapy as a treatment for cancer, for instance, based solely on some politician’s belief that the only cure is to eat lots of vegetables. Were we to elect Jehovah’s Witnesses to office, I can’t see us banning blood transfusions.
So why do we continue to let our elected politicians ignore the science when it comes to drug issues? Why should anybody’s poorly informed position around drug use be the lens that we apply when trying to address complex health and social problems that are far too important to be left to political whim?
I respect the right of Stephen Harper and his MPs to believe that using illicit drugs is bad. It’s a free country and they’re welcome to their opinions, and never mind that alcohol is actually Canada’s most dangerous and readily available drug by a long shot. (The social costs of alcohol use in Canada are more than double that of all illicit drugs combined and health-related costs are three times higher.)
But why would we want to base something as important as our national drug strategy on opinion and belief?
We’ve got six decades worth of scientific studies underlining the importance of an informed, health-based approach in reducing the harm and societal costs of drug use. Yet we’re still letting vital public policy be decided by people who would rather maintain their personal fictions than take steps to fix the problems.
“This is a failed approach,” University of B.C. researcher Thomas Kerr commented to the media this week about the Harper government’s intention to launch yet another anti-drug strategy rooted almost entirely in enforcement. “The experiment is done. The science is in.”
We’ve researched drug-use issues from every possible angle over the years, and have established an astonishing amount of consensus at the scientific level in terms of how Canada can best manage problems related to drug and alcohol use. We verified a long, long time ago that concentrating our efforts on enforcement is not only futile as a way of reducing much of the problem, but also alarmingly costly.
But our current federal drug strategy devotes almost three-quarters of its annual $245 million budget to enforcement. The updated strategy being touted by the Harper government offers more of the same - and less of what’s actually working. Highly successful harm-reduction strategies like Vancouver’s safer- injection site are rumoured to be on the chopping block.
What is it that we`re trying to change? If it’s the flow of drugs into our country, then we need to tackle the issues of demand. We can knock ourselves out trying to stop drugs at the border, but they’re going to find their way in no matter what as long as there are Canadians to buy them.
If it’s the health risks we’re worried about, then we need to be providing honest information to everyone who might use drugs, particularly pre-teens heading into the inevitable experimental years. The key word is “honest,” which implies being truthful about which drugs are truly the scary ones.
Our old friend alcohol certainly wouldn’t fare well in that truth-telling. The annual health costs from alcohol consumption in Canada are almost 45 times that of marijuana, and alcohol is far and away the most dangerous drug of all to use during pregnancy.
If it’s drug addiction that we want to have an impact on, that entails dramatic, system-wide change, because we’re doing almost nothing right on that front at the moment. Addiction is a health issue, plain and simple. We’ll get somewhere when we start treating it like one.
So with all due respect, Mr. Harper, believe whatever you like in your personal life. But as prime minister, please run this country on facts and not fiction.

Norman Spector and the "bitch"
Nov. 3, 2006

A co-worker of mine keeps a “to do” list taped to her computer to remind her of ways to improve her life. Rule No. 1: “Keep ‘inside voices’ inside.”
As newspaper columnist and ex-politico Norman Spector is learning for himself this week, that’s a rule to live by. Having no fear about speaking your mind has its charming aspects, as anyone who has met Spector in person will know. But sooner or later, it’s going to trip you up big time.
Spector did a radio interview with Vancouver’s Bill Good this week and let loose about Belinda Stronach, the Liberal MP whose personal life has seemingly captivated Canada’s federal press gallery.
“Bitch is a word that I would use to describe someone like Belinda Stronach,” said Spector in the now infamous exchange. “You know, I’m not in politics, I can say it. I think she’s a bitch and I think that 90 per cent of men would probably say she’s a bitch for the way she’s broken up Tie Domi’s home and the way she dumped Peter MacKay.”
Perhaps Spector has already offered this opinion in less public settings. Having experienced the mixed blessing of his sharp and undiscerning intellect at my own dinner table a few years ago, I know the man doesn’t shy away from putting forth an opinion.
But Bill Goode’s show was no dinner party. Spector was live on the radio when he made those comments about Stronach, speaking to however many Lower Mainland radio listeners were tuned into the show. And that’s just not the place to let your inside voice do the talking.
Comments like Spector’s can be taken as insulting on so many fronts, and play into that tired old stereotype of the harlot luring good family men from their happy families. But without getting into the right and wrong of any of that, Spector’s biggest sin was to make his comments in a public arena.
He’s free to think what he likes about Belinda Stronach, of course; so far, nobody has figured out a way to nail us for the thoughts in our head. But he said it out loud - on the radio, no less. And that’s a big mistake.
For the most part, I enjoy people who speak their minds. I like people who make their position clear, because at least that tells me who I’m dealing with. If I were Stronach, I’d prefer to know right up front whether any national columnists thought of me as a “bitch” who’d wrecked Tie Domi’s marriage, as that would let me put their comments about me as a politician into the right context.
But that’s not to say I’d want to hear it on the radio, spoken as if it were truth. Spoken as if the subject should even be up for public discussion. Sure, we’re all free to our own opinions, but Spector of all people certainly ought to know that with such a right comes an equal measure of responsibility.
When one-time politico Mike Geoghegan mused in 2003 about B.C. MLA Jenny Kwan’s race and looks as factors in her getting elected, those who knew Geoghegan understood he didn’t really mean it to come out that way. No such kind interpretation can be given to Spector’s comments about Stronach. As a high-ranking advisor to former prime minister Brian Mulroney and B.C. premier Bill Bennett, Spector is no stranger to the concept of discretion.
In person, Spector is much nicer and way more fun than the average reader might anticipate based on his sombre analyses of world issues. But he’s got a ruthless streak, as I witnessed for myself at that fateful dinner party, during which he raised one intense, controversial topic after another as dinner-table conversation.
Abortion. Religion. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All the subjects they teach you to avoid in Dinner Party 101. He talked so ferociously about capital punishment that one of the more sensitive dinner guests finally broke into tears, prompting Spector to wonder aloud whether that explained why he didn’t get more return dinner invitations.
He’ll certainly be off Stronach’s invite list. But she’ll survive his rude and ungentlemanly comments, and will likely endure far worse in years to come if she sticks it out in federal politics. Being called a bitch by a guy Stronach is probably only barely aware of is no big deal in the grand scheme of things.
But Spector might want to do a little reflecting on the matter, and why it is he gave into such a childish bout of name-calling and judgment. He’s a smart, worldly guy who ought to feel mortified at being caught out sounding like a scorned teenager spluttering out insults as the prom queen passes by.
Inside voices, Norman. Some thoughts just aren’t meant to be shared.