The following article is a part of our series: Cash Cow to Scapegoats. This series highlights the good, the bad, and the ugly of immigration from the perspective of international students.

Today, our focus is on housing.

Thousands of students migrate every year to Canada, leaving their friends, family, and homes for a new country in their journey to pursue education. Naturally, one’s university becomes a home away from home.

Universities act as a parent, an educator, a landlord, and a restaurant. This understanding of a university as en loco parentis, that is as assuming the role of parent, however, has taken a market-driven turn for the worse in recent years. In previous articles, we have discussed issues pertaining to this market-driven approach to universities.

The academy is full of flaws.

But that does not mean the university should be solely blamed for a broken system.

In August of 2023, Minister Sean Fraser of Housing and Infrastructure put in place a temporary cap on international students to ease the pressure on the housing market. Fraser, at the time minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, made a case for the cap by citing the housing crunch in communities with post-secondary education institutions.

Stories of growing waitlists for on-campus housing saw a surge. It is true universities were overbooked at a certain point. Cases of classes being held in cinema halls made the news.

The Hill/Website

The government, however, has become something of an unreliable narrator of our ground reality. To critique the academy’s reliance on high enrollment numbers and on deregulated international student tuition fees, one must consider the decline in public funding of universities.

This defunding over the last thirty years has left universities underfunded, unregulated, and without a sustainable model.

To this add the problem of housing, Canadians, coast to coast are tied together by a fabric of a crisis in the form of precarious housing. Students, domestic and international, are some of the most vulnerable people in the face of this crisis. After all, let’s be clear, this isn’t just a housing crisis, it is an affordable housing crisis. Studies by StatsCan, moreover, indicate international students are the most likely to settle for a simply unpleasant housing situation.

CBC/Website

Why is it that, especially when dignified, housing should be a human right?

Navigating a housing market requires a degree of familiarity. A competitive rental market often brings competition amongst the pool of renters. Landlords, thus, can demand a credit history, references from previous landlords, and income statements.

But, what if you don’t have a track record in the system that you are trying to enter? What if you’ve just moved to Canada? Don’t have a credit history, haven’t rented before, and don’t have income statements? This is often something international (and domestic) students lack.

Add to this, the issues of racial discrimination that persists when competing in the housing market.

“Housing is hard to find. Sometimes, for example, even if you’ve acquired affordable housing it might not be the most accessible. I personally, had to sacrifice my peace and privacy while living with strangers just to have a roof on top of me at night,” one student told this reporter.

The hidden cost of being an international student is resilience. Navigating a housing market that isolates you requires incredible resilience. Working more hours and sacrificing privacy by living in crowded apartments while ignoring tenancy laws is one way some international students cope with an affordability crisis which has at its basis the corporation and financialization of housing. Housing has become corporate sponsored.

One way to think of this situation as a corporate sponsored one is the ongoing financialization of the housing market.

By the financialization of the housing market refers to the rise in prominence of financial actors such as pension firms, and investment trusts in the housing sector. The monopolization of the market thus, has left some more vulnerable than others due to increased eviction rates that have been observed over unpaid dues.

A question persists.

Will an international student cap fix the housing crisis in Canada? Or will it exacerbate the trend of anti-intellectualism we are already observing?

Centennial College for example has suspended over 45 courses since the decline in international enrollment. Seneca College has also announced the closure of its Markham Campus.

As an observer, it is at times like these we wonder if the decline in public funding of universities, tied together by an international student cap, is an attack on the academy and its future.