🧵 1/6 In Another Country, They'd Call It Corruption

DID YOU KNOW? For nearly 4 years (March 2020 to December 2023), the Canadian government had a policy that allowed international students to complete their entire college program overseas, on Zoom, never once setting foot in Canada, and still fully qualify for a Post-Graduation Work Permit.

This happened quietly. During a lockdown. While everyone was at home. And almost nobody talked about it.

Revisiting how Canada's international student program lost its integrity.

The Policy Timeline:
→ March 2020: COVID hits. Borders close. Students already enrolled cannot travel. IRCC introduces a temporary exemption — classes moved online will not affect PGWP eligibility. Reasonable. Nobody was going anywhere.
→ September 2020: Extended. Students can now complete up to 50% of their program from abroad and remain PGWP eligible. Still arguably defensible.

→ February 12, 2021: This is where temporary compassion became something else entirely. Then Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino announced that international students could now complete up to 100% of their program from outside Canada and still be fully eligible for a PGWP. His exact words: "Our message to international students and graduates is simple — we don't just want you to study here, we want you to stay here."

Study from overseas. Pay full Canadian tuition. Attend Zoom lectures at 2 am to account for the time zone. Never once inside a Canadian classroom. Full PGWP at the end.

And who lobbied for this? Colleges and Institutes Canada — the national body representing every college in the country — publicly stated they had been actively calling for exactly this flexibility. They asked and Ottawa delivered.

→ August 2022: Extended again, to August 2023, now scaled to 50% of a program completable from abroad.

→ September 2023: Extended once more to December 31, 2023, for students who had started between September 2022 and December 2023.

Nearly four years. Hundreds of thousands of study permits issued for programs being delivered substantially or entirely online to students sitting in other countries. Full tuition collected. Full PGWP pipeline maintained.

Why was intake never paused?
Because money mattered more than anything else. To the colleges. To the federal government. To every level of a system that depended on the numbers continuing to flow. A paused intake meant paused tuition. And nobody at any level was prepared to let that happen, even at the expense of the integrity of the ISP. 🧵 2/6

Here is the part that made this not just a bad policy but a catastrophically exploited one.

Normally, growing student intake requires infrastructure. More campuses. More classrooms. More instructors. More physical space. Which translates to money and time.

Virtual Classrooms eliminated that equation entirely.
- One instructor.
- Two hundred students.
- A virtual room.
- No new campus.
- No new classroom.
- No construction cost.
- No lease.
- Pure margin.

And here is where the public-private partnership machine which had been quietly building for over a decade, found its perfect moment.

→ 2005: The very first model was born. Cambrian College in Sudbury entered a licensing agreement with Hanson Canada, allowing Hanson to deliver Cambrian programs exclusively to international students at GTA campuses. One northern public college. One private GTA partner. Revenue flowing north from students who never went north.

→ ~2012: The Harper government attached a PR pathway to any two-year credential from a Canadian designated learning institution. Every non-GTA public college in Ontario suddenly wanted access to international students but the students wanted Toronto, not Timmins. PPPs were the workaround: public college credential, GTA delivery, PGWP access.

→ 2012 onwards: Nine new PPP deals signed in quick succession. For five of the six Ontario colleges that had PPPs by 2019–20, the tuition revenue from these arrangements was the single difference between surplus and deficit.

→ 2017: Senior Ontario civil servant David Trick formally recommended the Liberal government wind down PPPs entirely. The risks included predatory recruiting, low-quality education, PGWP misuse, were too great. A moratorium was recommended.

It never came.

→ 2019: The Ford government introduced a Binding Ministerial Policy on PPPs, but made the regulations so lax that virtually anyone could pass them. A grandfather clause meant northern colleges with 4,000 students at a Toronto PPP and barely any at their home campus just had to make vague suggestions about "coming into compliance over the long term."

→ 2020–2023 (COVID hits and the glitch activates):
No infrastructure costs. Zoom classrooms scaling to hundreds per session. A government policy saying study from anywhere, still get your PGWP. And an entire private college sector in the GTA ready to absorb unlimited students at zero marginal infrastructure cost.

PPP revenues grew from $268 million in 2020 as new players rushed in. By 2022, nearly every non-GTA public college in Ontario had a PPP.

The key players:
→ Hanson Canada with Cambrian College (Sudbury)
→ triOS College with Mohawk College + Sault College, Brampton/Mississauga/Toronto
→ Stanford International with Canadore College (North Bay), four GTA campuses
→ Alpha College with St. Lawrence College (Kingston)
→ ILAC International with Fanshawe + Georgian, four Toronto campuses
→ Toronto School of Management with Niagara College
→ Pures College with Northern College (Timmins)
→ Cestar / Queen's College with Lambton College

And lest anyone wonder why the Ford government kept regulations deliberately soft: Ontario's Colleges Minister Jill Dunlop raised over $151,000 from directors and executives of private PPP colleges between 2018 and 2022. Nearly $24,000 came from a single meet-and-greet in March 2022, where nearly a third of the 78 attendees were associated with public-private college partnerships.

The money wasn't just flowing into the colleges. It was flowing toward the people writing the rules.

- Zero infrastructure cost.
- Maximum student volume.
- Government-backed PGWP access.
- Soft regulations kept soft by political donations.
- And a Zoom policy that meant you didn't even need to be in the same country.

They had found the infinite money glitch. And they ran it for four years.