Federal election 2025: International students share their experience, thoughts on cuts to study permits

At the end of 2024, Canada hosted a total of 997,820 international students. This figure represents a remarkable increase from the 326,120 study permit holders a decade earlier. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, but especially within the last year, international education has become a hot-button issue. In January 2024, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada made a significant policy change to its approach to international study permits, imposing a cap of about 360,000 international study permi