Province, universities teaming up to fight 'housing crunch'

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The provincial government is partnering with the four big public universities to provide more student housing in an attempt to take some pressure off New Brunswick’s overcrowded real estate market.

It’s a new initiative, and $12 million has been allocated to be spent during the 2024-2025 fiscal year, Minister for Post-Secondary Education, Training and Labour Greg Turner said in the legislature on Wednesday.

Liberal critic Marco LeBlanc spent a lot of time focusing on students’ financial needs, and how he thinks the province needs to do more to help them in tough economic times.

But he eventually drilled down into the housing cash.

The money will be split between the province’s four big public universities, Turner said, and negotiations with Université de Moncton, the University of New Brunswick, Mount Allison University and St. Thomas University are ongoing.

But Turner said Mount A and STU are each expected to get about five per cent of the money. UNB will likely get 30 per cent, and the remaining 60 per cent will likely go to Université de Moncton. That 60 per cent will also be used to help create student housing in other communities where the university has satellite campuses, like Edmundston and Shippagan.

“That’s the framework we’re working with right now,” Turner said.

LeBlanc then pushed for answers about how the province is helping students attending community colleges find housing. They include Collège communautaire du Nouveau-Brunswick, Maritime College of Forest Technology, New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, and New Brunswick Community College.

To that question, Turner said the colleges needed to work with the municipalities their campuses are located in, and tap into federal funding. But that money isn’t specifically for student housing.

“The idea is we add housing in those communities to support the community colleges in those communities,” he said. “That helps the housing situation in those community.

“In other words, right now, you have a lot of students … who are housed in regular apartments, not student-oriented buildings, but in regular apartments where the general public could be. So it’s to take the pressure off the community.”

Boil it down, Turner said, and it’s all about helping tackle New Brunswick’s “housing crunch.”

International student influx

There’s been a lot of debate since the federal government announced a international student cap for the school year ahead, in part pointing to newcomers’ effect on the national housing crisis. 

New Brunswick has been given a reprieve from that cap after months of behind-the-scenes negotiations with Ottawa, which ended with both sides praising the other. 

Turner was peppered with questions about how many international students were enrolled in post-secondary education last year, and eventually revealed the number: 9,916. He stressed that that figure included all post-secondary institutions, including the flight colleges in Fredericton and Moncton. 

But of the 9,916, he said, only 4,600 were newcomers. The rest were already here, and many were already studying. Via the Provincial Nominee Program, about 1,600 received permission to stay after their studies ended last year, Turner said.