Province needs more control of immigration following federal cap, MLA says

A Green Party MLA says New Brunswick should have more control over immigration numbers in response to the federal government's new cap on international study permits.

Megan Mitton says Ottawa's "one-size-fits-all" decision is "going to have a negative impact, for sure" on the province's post-secondary institutions.

"I think this demonstrates the need for New Brunswick to have more control over the immigration flow, because this decision's been taken at the federal level and it's having negative consequences here," she said.

Mitton made the comment during a meeting of the legislature's public accounts committee after Dan Mills, the deputy minister at the Department of Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour, also criticized the federal move.

"Overall, our perspective is this is a terrible idea, what the federal government rolled out on Jan. 22," Millstold the MLAs on the committee.

Trevor Holder, the former Progressive Conservative post-secondary education minister, said in an interview he wasn't sure the province needed more control over immigration, but he agreed it must push Ottawa to give New Brunswick more flexibility.

The province's universities and colleges were urged to "ramp up" their recruitment of international students to address low population growth and labour shortages, Holder said.

"They stepped up, and they did it in a big way, and now I feel it's almost like they're being penalized for their good work."

The federal government announced in January it would slash the number of undergraduate study permits by 35 per cent to 360,000 nationwide. New Brunswick will get 5,580 spots.

The cut was a response to concerns that the increase in international students was adding to the housing shortage.

But Mills told MLAs that this is "largely not a problem in New Brunswick" because both public universities and private colleges have been responsible in their handling of enrolment growth and its impact on housing.

New Brunswick needs more international students because many of them will stay and join the labour market, he said.

Mills cited projections projections that the province will have 133,000 job openings in the next decade because of retirements.

The cap "is going to be a major challenge. It's going to throw a major wrench into the whole recruitment side of things this year."

Liberal says cap does not align with province's needs

Permits are being distributed to provinces based on population, and each province will decide how to allocate them among their schools.

Liberal MLA Marco LeBlanc, the party's post-secondary education critic, agreed that Ottawa's cap number "does not align" with the province's needs but disagreed that New Brunswick needs more power over immigration numbers.

"[Whether] the government of New Brunswick has more power or not is not necessarily going to impact how many students are going to post-secondary institutions in New Brunswick," he said.

Ottawa is also capping the number of acceptance letters that New Brunswick can issue at 9,300, based on an assumption that 60 per cent of the students will come here.

"That's just not the case," Mills said. "They're using a national average."

In fact, he said, only about 30 to 40 per cent of the students the province accepts end up choosing to study here, meaning it needs to be allocated a higher number of acceptance letters to get the 5,580 students Ottawa is allowing.

Mills said departmental officials are grappling with the issue "literally every day" and are in constant discussions with universities and colleges about how to overcome the problem posed by the acceptance letter issue.

"Our goal, frankly, will be to meet the number that the federal government has given us to the best of our ability," he said.

"It's going to be extremely challenging, given the federal government's estimate of what I would call conversion rates."

New Brunswick has increased tenfold the number of international students it has nominated for permanent residency in the last four years, Mills said.

The number has gone from 250 in 2019 to 2,500 last year. Of the 2,500, about 1,600 attended university or college in New Brunswick and the remainder relocated here after studying elsewhere in Canada.