Implementing the lessons from Canada’s Auditor General report

Perhaps the most consequential finding in the report, and the one most likely to get lost in the immediate news cycle, is this: Canada still has no measurable plan for diversifying its international student population, despite committing to one in 2019.

The numbers from the report make the point starkly. In 2023, Indian nationals represented 51.6% of new study permit holders. By 2025, that figure had dropped to 8.1%. China grew from 4.8% to 18.9%. Europe rose from 3% to 21.2%. Francophone African countries, the group IRCC has explicitly committed to supporting, moved from 9.2% to 8.7%.

The shift happened, but not by design. It was the consequence of cancelling the Student Direct Stream and tightening processing, not the result of deliberate market development, diplomatic engagement, or recruitment investment. As I have noted previously, one of the most striking features of this period has been not only the scale of policy change, but the strategic silence that surrounded it. International education was rarely discussed as an asset connected to Canada’s foreign policy, trade objectives, or global influence. Soft power, education diplomacy, alumni networks: these concepts were largely absent from federal discourse throughout the period this audit covers.

For the students who lived through this period, the policy turbulence was not abstract. Acceptance letters arrived. Permit decisions did not. Students deferred programs, negotiated deferrals that institutions could not always grant, or withdrew and chose destinations that offered clearer timelines. The sector’s reputation as a welcoming and predictable destination eroded in the very markets Canada had spent years cultivating, among students who had already committed to coming.

Diversification is not simply a risk management exercise… it is a question about what kind of country Canada wants to be.

Diversification is not simply a risk management exercise, though concentration risk is real and the sector knows it well. It is a question about what kind of country Canada wants to be, and what role its universities and colleges play in that project. As the Dutch saying goes, trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. The reputational equity Canada built over decades as a welcoming, accessible, and high-quality destination for international students is not infinitely renewable. It requires tending.

The larger question

Minister Diab’s statement accepts the Auditor General’s recommendations and frames the findings as a snapshot of an early implementation phase. The minister is right that provincial allocation usage and institutional recruitment decisions sit outside direct federal control (but provide the specific numbers to the provinces). But the statement also repeats a pattern the sector has come to recognise: accountability distributed across levels of government in ways that make it difficult to locate clearly anywhere. The minister references provincial responsibility for designated institutions, institutional responsibility for student recruitment, and market forces shaping overall volumes. All of that is true. None of it explains why IRCC did not act on 800 confirmed fraud cases, why it built an allocation model that structurally disadvantaged smaller provinces, or why it still has no measurable diversification framework six years after committing to one.

British Columbia’s  Bill 7 – Post-Secondary International Education (Designated Institution) Act, which received royal assent earlier in March, offers a concrete illustration of what happens when provinces act to fill the space federal policy leaves vacant. The legislation establishes new quality assurance requirements for designated institutions, including agent oversight obligations, minimum student support standards, and enrolment reporting frameworks. It addresses, at the provincial level, several of the integrity and monitoring gaps this report identifies at the federal level. That it is necessary is welcome. That it is necessary is also the problem.

The more important conversation is about design: what kind of international education system does Canada want, and does the country have the institutional capacity and political will to build it?

We are at a moment when Canada’s relationship with its closest trading partner is under real strain, when geopolitical realignment is reshaping student mobility globally, and when competition for internationally mobile talent is intensifying across every major destination country. The countries Canada builds deep educational relationships with today are its partners, markets, and allies of the future.

Canada has the institutions and the global reputation to compete at that level. What it has lacked, and what this report documents in considerable detail, is a federal system capable of setting targets, measuring outcomes, acting on its own intelligence, and treating provinces and institutions as genuine partners rather than downstream recipients of policy decisions.

Building the plane while flying it has been a fair description of Canadian international education policy for several years now. The Auditor General has pointed to where the engineering fell short. The question is whether this report becomes the foundation for something better designed, or whether it simply prompts another round of adjustments to a system that was not built for the world it now operates in. That is the question the sector should be pressing on. Loudly, and together.

This is Part 2 of a two-part article. Part 1, which sets out the main pillars in the report, was published earlier this week.

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