How Foreign Government Funding Impacts Canadian Universities

The real story here is that there’s no data. We’re flying blind.

South of the border, section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires U.S. colleges and universities receiving federal financial assistance to publicly disclose gifts and contracts from foreign sources that total $250,000 or more in a calendar year. At a time when the U.S. faces multiple hostile foreign governments with unknown strategic incentives, being able to reliably track the more than $5 billion spent annually is critical.¹

But there are exactly zero requirements for Canadian higher education institutions to publicly report similar funding. Are Communist Party officials in China setting the curriculum your kids receive at University of British Columbia? Does Qatar determine whether pro-Hamas protesters get to intimidate Jewish students on campus at Metropolitan University in Toronto without fear of sanction? If you’re not an insider, there’s no way to know.

Not only is there no data, but I’m not even sure which government department - or even which level of government - should theoretically be responsible for such decisions.²

What’s at stake?

Cultural and Academic Influence

Confucius Institutes - which were in some cases rebranded as “Chinese Language and Culture Institutes” - have long been embedded in some Canadian universities. They were officially designed to promote Mandarin language studies along with cultural understanding. Over time, the institutes were accused of spreading Chinese government propaganda and interfering with university curriculum development and faculty independence.

Although changing attitudes have more recently led to the winding down of many such relationships, some still exist. And there’s no reason to think that the Chinese government has abandoned the strategic goals that drove the original institutes.

The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) has published the results of their digging into the issue in their Assault on Democratic Values and Principles: how Islamist entryism weakens civil society and higher education in Canada.

ISGAP is aware of some funding for energy infrastructure-related research projects in the millions of dollars. But that might be just the tip of the iceberg.

ISGAP highlights the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) and its investments targeting at least Toronto Metropolitan and Dalhousie. Qatar-owned University of Doha for Science and Technology is reportedly developing a similar relationship with University of Toronto.

There’s certainly no proof that anything inappropriate is going on here. But in the context of how little hard evidence exists, that’s hardly a surprise.

Institutional Influence

It’s no secret that international students pay an average of $41,746 in tuition for a year of undergraduate education - far more than their local classmates. It’s also no secret that, until recently at least, international students were a major source of funding for Canadian universities.

In fact, for the 2023-2024 academic year, international students made up nearly 20 percent of all university enrollment.³ It’s worth noting that that’s more than double the percentage from 2009-2010, when the 98,877 international students were just 8.24 percent of the total.

Nevertheless, besides the fact that recent demographic trends and changes to visa rules have triggered falling foreign enrollment, receiving tuition from overseas parents should hardly qualify as a security threat. So what’s the concern?

In fact, overseas parents are not the issue. But many students from countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and the UAE are funded by their governments. And some of those arrangements take the form of direct third-party billing that bypass students and their families altogether.

Consider how the tuition payments for aggregated cohorts of students could be consolidated into fewer but larger funding transfers. The foreign funders signing off on the payments could conceivably leverage their financial power to build relationships with key university officials. And those relationships could, in turn, be used to influence university policies in ways that fit foreign goals.

And as long as there’s no mandated reporting providing public visibility, there’s no way for Canadians - or Canadian governments for that matter - to know what’s going on.

1. Although, according to the Wall Street Journal, in recent years institutions failed to disclose nearly $6.5 billion in foreign gifts and contracts

2. For what it’s worth, the three AI chat models I asked gave me three very different answers:

Grok: Any requirement framed around foreign governments, foreign influence, national security, research security, or conditions on federal research funding falls squarely in federal jurisdiction. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) alongside Public Safety would be the likely lead agencies.

Claude: A province could simply pass a statute or issue a funding-agreement condition requiring institutions to disclose foreign government funding - no federal involvement needed.

ChatGPT: A province could in principle amend its university legislation or impose conditions on provincial funding requiring universities to disclose relevant details. However, Statistics Canada could theoretically leverage their existing data-gathering relationships with universities by expanding the required financial reporting categories to obtain more detailed information about foreign-government sources.

3. When you include college students, the 2023-2024 foreign student cohort rises to nearly 25 percent.