International students pay sky-high fees. Whose job is it to house them?

Around 800,000 international students currently call Canada home, with thousands more expected to come with every new academic year.

As students head back to school this fall, the focus is increasing on whose responsibility it is to house them, and what the growing numbers mean for Canada’s housing crisis.

Pressure is growing on the Liberal government to address the housing crisis, and several federal ministers have hinted that the number of international students could be capped in the future to ease housing demand.

This is a tale as old as time, that immigrants are responsible for social crises; that immigrants and migrants are responsible for the housing shortage, which is simply not true, said Sarom Rho, an organizer for Migrant Workers Alliance for Change (MWAC).

Rho said Canada has already seen that a cap on international students wouldnt work, because it has already seen something similar to a cap during the COVID-19 crisis.

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In 2020 and 2021, we saw that very few migrants, including current and former international students, were coming to this country because the borders were closed. Yet housing prices continue to increase. In fact, they spiked drastically.