The 2025 fall semester saw in effect how the federal government’s decision to reduce international students’ acceptance into Canadian universities has impacted Canadian universities. Whether through hiring freezes, cancelled courses or ominous deficits, let’s review the budgeting changes of various universities across the country and their impacts on students.
Brock University
Brock’s internal budget planning decisions for the 2025-26 academic year were announced before the fall term ended. In an update on March 10, 2025, The Brock News stated that “across the teaching faculties,” savings and efficiencies in the part-time teaching budget were pursued by “collapsing sections,” “rotating courses,” and “ensuring class sizes were aligned with room capacity.”
The same update stated that the Faculty of Education reduced the total number of sections in 2025-26 by 180 and that the Faculty of Humanities removed seminars for upper-level courses. The update also stated that the Faculty of Mathematics and Science’s course enrolment and scheduling policy had greater than 90 per cent adoption, resulting in the cancellation of low-enrolment courses and the standardization of teaching assistant allocations across units.
Queen’s University
At Queen’s University, course-level instructional-support changes for 2025-26 were reported during the fall term. On Sept. 19, 2025, The Queen’s Journal reported that decreased teaching assistant (TA) hours had gone into effect for the 2025-26 school year.
The same report — using internal data shared with the paper — stated that HLTH 101 TA hours dropped from 1,660 to 840 after bi-weekly tutorials were cut. In a statement quoted by The Queen’s Journal, Queen’s wrote that “decisions on TA hours are made at the faculty level annually through the budget process and are based on undergraduate enrolments and trends and changing course pedagogies.”
Simon Fraser University
In British Columbia, Simon Fraser University’s HR “Hiring Freeze FAQs” describe a continuing hiring freeze and links it to financial pressures, including lower international enrolments. The FAQ’s also state that the staff hiring freeze began at 5 p.m. on Nov. 2, 2023, and will continue until further notice. SFU faces financial challenges due to lower international enrollments and increased cost pressures, and states that “new changes in government policies” affecting international student enrolment and visa regulations continue to negatively impact income.
The University of Windsor
Some universities publicly described revenue shortfalls and cost-containment actions for 2025-26 in ways that included staffing and hiring measures. The University of Windsor’s public affairs release about its 2025-26 operating budget states that the university entered the budget planning cycle facing a projected tuition revenue shortfall of more than $30 million following a $14 million shortfall the previous year, and says that the decline was largely driven by sector-wide decreases in international enrolment, compounded by frozen domestic tuition rates and rising operational costs. The operating budget included measures implemented across campus, including personnel reductions; hiring and salary freezes; voluntary retirements and early severance programs; as well as operational restructuring.
Thompson Rivers University (TRU)
In another documented case, Thompson Rivers University (TRU) posted an update on Sept. 24, 2025, discussing “budget sustainability” and describing workforce impacts. TRU’s update states that department managers began issuing verbal notices to CUPE colleagues in positions identified for possible reduction and that, because of bumping provisions, approximately 65 people were notified. TRU expected up to 40 people could ultimately be affected and that within CUPE, 28 people accepted an Early Retirement Incentive Plan, 38 vacant positions would remain unfilled and nearly 50 faculty members accepted an ERIP option.
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Taken together, these documents and reports show mechanisms by which Canadian universities’ budget responses were expressed during the fall 2025 term: course-section consolidation and seminar removal, instructional-support reductions with eliminated tutorials, workforce reduction notices and vacancy holds and an ongoing administrative hiring freeze described as a cost-containment policy.