When Ecuadorian international student Kristel Paredes arrived in Canada to study at St.
Thomas University she expected to encounter opportunities just like her sister, who has lived in Canada for almost four years.
Her sister found easy access to affordable housing and quick employment when she first moved away from home.
Paredes’s experience couldn’t have been further from what she expected. When she arrived in the summer of 2023, housing and job shortages in Canada hit international students particularly hard, making it difficult for her to find accommodations and work.
“At the beginning, I thought everything was going to be very easy,” she said. “Because I came with my sister’s perspective of the country, I thought those same opportunities awaited me.”
According to Statistics Canada, International students pay up to 10 per cent more in rent per unit than locals, due to limited access to subsidized housing. The federal agency also notes that 43 per cent of recent immigrants struggle financially during their first 12 months in Canada due to the challenges of adapting to a new country.
Paredes said it took around six months to find an affordable apartment near campus and two months to land her first job. These challenges have reshaped Paredes’s expectations of finding better job prospects than in Ecuador.
She said she became disappointed and discouraged as she continued to struggle with her studies, job search, the language barrier and loneliness.
“In that moment I wondered if [the problem] was me or Canada,” she said.
Paredes also said she was shocked by the high food and electricity costs, which quickly added up each month.
“Back home you could go to the fruit market and get all the fruits for $10, but here $10 buys you two apples,” Paredes said.” I didn’t know it was going to be so much and that you needed to have two jobs to afford it.”
“It was something I didn’t plan for.”
Paredes now works two part-time jobs to afford her $675 rent, though she struggles to make ends meet by barely working 20 hours a week.
“When I first came here, I expected to get 20 hours with just one part-time job,” she said. “I’m hoping to [eventually] get a better job that pays me better and only work 20 hours as well, because working two jobs is very tiring, but I have to do it to pay rent.”
Recent immigration policy changes, including stricter post-graduation work permit requirements and a tighter international student cap, have only added to Paredes’s worries about her future in Canada.
Paredes had planned to finish her studies at STU and then get her permanent residence so she could later complete a master’s. She said going back to her country, after all the effort she has made to live in Canada, didn’t make sense to her.
However, she feels unsure if her efforts will be enough to overcome the issues the country is going through, specifically the cost of living.
“I’m somewhat scared for my future now,” she said. “I feel like I should have a backup plan, which I don’t really have.”
Similarly, STU alumna Domenica Sanchez has doubts about her future in the country. Sanchez came to Canada to study criminology, a field that was unavailable at universities in Ecuador when she graduated high school in 2020.
She aspired to be part of the police force in Ecuador — however, due to the corruption in the field and the current dangerous state of the country, she decided studying in Canada was the best option for her.
“If you try to be a good person, or a good cop, [the Ecuadorian police] are going to try to corrupt you somehow,” Sanchez said. “Somehow they will threaten your family, or you are going to end up threatened and maybe they will try to kill you.”
According to an investigation done by Ecuadorian news station TC Television and CONNECTAS, a nonprofit organization that facilitates journalistic research, 1,898 police officers were incarcerated for committing crimes against the integral penal code from 2018 to the first 6 months of 2022.
This implies that at least once a day one police officer in Ecuador is arrested.
Having graduated in 2024, Sanchez aims to join the RCMP, but recent visa challenges and Canada’s high cost of living have made her reconsider.
She admits that living in the country wasn’t as easy as she imagined when she first came.
She applied for her visa in June, only to receive approval in October, just in time for her holiday plans to visit her family in Ecuador. The process was stressful for her, as she feared the delay on her visa would interfere with her travelling plans.
“It’s been three years since I have been home for a holiday, so I was planning on going this year,” said Sanchez.
When she didn’t hear from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada about her application for four months, Sanchez was considering returning to Ecuador.
Sanchez doesn’t attribute the delay of her application to the changes in immigration policy, as she recounts her previous visa had some months left before it expired and explained they didn’t consider her case a top priority.
Sanchez is aware of the current housing crisis, labour shortage and inflation in the country and said that if things continue to get worse, she is considering moving to another country.
“What else can we do? If there’s no jobs, no money, not enough housing,” she said.
Paredes is still hopeful for her future in Canada, as she wants to continue to pursue her career and life aspirations in the country.
“I feel like if I move somewhere else, I will need to do the same thing – work and study at the same time – and [starting over] would be a waste of money,” Paredes said.
“I’m not the first person dealing with something like this, so I think that if someone else was able to make it, I can make it too.”
