‘You Need To Go Home’: Alberta’s Message To Indian Students Denied Work Permits

When Alberta Premier Danielle Smith was asked about the several hundred Indian graduates who had spent weeks protesting in a northeast Calgary parking lot, she did not offer them much. “Our view is that if you come here as an international student and your visa expires, and you don’t have permanent residency, you need to go home,” she said.

The remark, made on 29 July 2026 at a media conference otherwise devoted to a federal-provincial housing agreement, travelled quickly through Punjabi households on both sides of the ocean. For the graduates sitting on the asphalt at Saddletowne Circle, some of them several days into a hunger strike, it read as a door closing.

But the premier’s sentence, however blunt, is not really the story. The story is how roughly 1,500 people came to enrol in Canadian college programmes that a federal department would later decide never qualified them for anything.

What the premier actually said

Smith was responding to a question about graduates of Portage College, a public institution based in Lac La Biche, Alberta. Her full answer contained a second line that received less attention than the first.

I think perhaps Portage maybe overstated the pathway to permanent residency. But our view is that if you come here as an international student and your visa expires, and you don’t have permanent residency, you need to go home.

Danielle Smith, Premier of Alberta, 29 July 2026

That first clause matters. Smith was not disputing that the students had been misled. She was suggesting they had been, by a college in her own province, and then declining to treat that as Alberta’s problem to fix. In the same appearance she argued that what the province really needed was a larger share of economic immigration allotments from Ottawa, which is a policy position about future arrivals rather than an answer for the people already here.

Why the students were protesting

The demonstration began on 24 July at Saddletowne Circle, near the Genesis Centre in northeast Calgary, and ran for weeks. Most of the protesters were from Punjab, with a smaller number from Haryana. Earlier, on 21 July, around 500 graduates had filled the McGrane Theatre at Portage College’s Lac La Biche campus, many arriving by chartered bus from Calgary.

Their demand was narrower than the coverage sometimes suggested. They were not asking for permanent residency. They were asking for the post-graduation work permit (PGWP) they believed their diploma entitled them to apply for — the three-year open work permit that is, for most international graduates, the only realistic bridge between a Canadian credential and Canadian work experience.

Without it, a graduate has no legal way to work, no way to accumulate the experience that most permanent residence streams require, and a study permit that expires on a fixed date. Several of those refused said they had roughly 90 days of status remaining when the decision letter arrived.

What actually went wrong

The graduates held Portage College credentials, but most of them had never studied in Lac La Biche. They studied at two private delivery partners: the Canadian Institute of Osteopathic Therapy (CIOT) in Calgary and Campbell College in Edmonton. The arrangement is known in the sector as curriculum licensing, or a public-private partnership — a public college licenses its programme to a private operator, which teaches it on its own campus.

Ottawa moved against that model in 2024. In April of that year, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) announced that students beginning a college programme delivered under a curriculum licensing arrangement on or after 15 May 2024 would not be eligible for a PGWP. Students who had started before that date were, in principle, protected.

Many of the Calgary and Edmonton graduates had enrolled in 2024 believing they fell on the safe side of that line. Their refusals, when they came, cited something else entirely.

On 24 June 2026, IRCC updated the PGWP eligibility page on canada.ca to state that a graduate of a non-credit programme of study is not eligible for a post-graduation work permit, with a narrow carve-out for certain flight school programmes. The programmes these students had completed — business management, administrative professional and teacher assistant diplomas, at fees generally reported between CAD $15,000 and $25,000 — were classified as non-credit.

Refusal letters began arriving in volume from early July.

The official position, and the hole in it

IRCC has been consistent: nothing changed. The department says the June update “clarified the existing eligibility requirements related to non-credit programs of study” and that there have been no changes to the eligibility criteria. At a press conference on 28 July, Immigration Minister Lena Metlege Diab put it flatly: “It has always been the case that non-credit are not entitled to these PGWP.”

Legally, that position is defensible. A PGWP has never been a reward for tuition paid; it has always been tied to programme type and institution. And the department has declined to grandfather the affected cohort.

The students’ objection is not really a legal one. It is about sequence. The rule they were refused under was published as website wording in June 2026, after they had enrolled, graduated and applied. If the requirement had always existed, they ask, why were officers approving the same programmes from the same college until shortly before?

That is the detail that makes this more than a misunderstanding. Roughly 50 graduates of the same programmes reportedly received approvals. Jaspreet Singh, founding president of the International Sikh Students Association, framed it simply: “IRCC updated its website in June, but students had already been receiving work permits for the same non-credit programme.”

Regulated Canadian immigration consultant Matthew McDonald described the episode as a failure of government communication regarding assumptions that had not been clearly articulated, and argued that qualified immigration advising should be mandatory at any designated learning institution.

Portage College, for its part, has confirmed that graduates of certain non-credit programmes received refusals. It stopped issuing letters of support after taking legal advice, stating that such a letter “would not be relevant to the assessment of Post-Graduation Work Permit applications,” and now directs former students to an immigration lawyer or a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant. Its Calgary and Edmonton partner campuses have closed, which the college says reflects partnership wind-downs planned since 2024 rather than the permit decisions.

When the protest met the border agency

On 13 August 2026, Canada Border Services Agency officers attended the Saddletowne protest site and checked the immigration status of 20 people. Twelve were identified as possibly inadmissible under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and asked to attend a CBSA office the same day for a follow-up interview. The agency cited privacy legislation in declining to say more.

The protest site is now empty.

Two weeks earlier, Prime Minister Mark Carney had said publicly that he was unaware of the hunger strike.

How many people are exposed

Precise figures are contested, because IRCC has not published a breakdown. What is on the record:

• Around 1,500 students are estimated to have enrolled in the Portage-affiliated programmes delivered by the two private partners.
• Roughly 480 graduates attended the largest single Calgary gathering; a student coalition puts the number of affected graduates nationally at up to 1,500.
• About 50 graduates of the same programmes are reported to have been approved before the refusals began.
• Tuition was generally between CAD $15,000 and $25,000 per student.

There are also allegations, reported in Indian media, that the programmes were marketed in Punjab through recruitment agencies — one Jalandhar-based operator has been named — and that CIOT was acquired by a private education group around 2022. Those claims have not been tested in any proceeding.

Which colleges are not eligible for a work permit

This is where prospective students are most often misled, so it is worth being exact: IRCC does not publish a list of banned or ineligible colleges. Any agent who shows you one has made it up. What IRCC publishes is a list of Designated Learning Institutions (DLIs), and being on that list means an institution can host international students — it does not mean its graduates get a work permit.

Eligibility is decided by four filters, and a programme must clear all of them:

1. Institution type. Graduates of public colleges, universities and CEGEPs are generally eligible. Most private colleges are not, with limited province-specific exceptions.
2. Curriculum licensing. If the programme is a public college’s curriculum taught by a private partner, and you began it on or after 15 May 2024, you are not eligible. This is the rule that closed the model the Alberta students were studying under.
3. Credit status. Non-credit programmes do not qualify, apart from certain flight school programmes. This is the specific ground on which the Portage-affiliated graduates were refused.
4. Field of study. For college-level programmes below a bachelor’s degree, IRCC applies a field-of-study requirement introduced on 1 November 2024. A programme outside the listed fields does not qualify even at an eligible public institution.

Language programmes and most short vocational courses fall outside PGWP eligibility entirely.

What to check before you pay a rupee

The single most useful habit is to stop asking whether a college is PGWP-eligible and start asking whether your specific programme, starting on your specific date, is. Four questions, in writing:

• Is this programme credit-bearing, and will the institution state that in writing?
• Who physically delivers it, and is the teaching campus owned by the institution named on my letter of acceptance?
• Is the DLI number on my acceptance letter the same institution that will teach me?
• Does the programme fall within the current field-of-study requirement for my level?

Verify the answers against the official IRCC eligibility page rather than a brochure, a WhatsApp forward or a consultant’s screenshot. If you are using an adviser, use one who is regulated — a Regulated Canadian Immigration Consultant listed with the College of Immigration and Citizenship Consultants, or a Canadian immigration lawyer. Unlicensed agents carry no accountability, and in this case the people who sold the programmes are not the people now facing removal.

None of that helps the graduates already sitting on expiring status in Calgary and Edmonton. Their options now are narrow: a request for reconsideration, an application for judicial review at the Federal Court, or departure. But it is a cheap lesson for the next cohort, and this year it has been an unusually expensive one to learn late.

Related reading on Prabh News: Does Canada Want Immigrants or Not? A 2026 Guide and Looking Beyond Canadian Education?