The Other Press Company's courses dupe visa students by Sam Lee TORONTO (CUP) -- A private firm may be exploiting international stu- dents at colleges and universities in Ontario. In the past few weeks, adver- tisements have been found on bulletin boards at Toronto post-secondary in- stitutions announcing the “Foreign Study Immigration Program”. Visa applicants who enrol in and complete the program are prom- ised “100 per cent guaranteed success” in obtaining landed immigrant status, a claim that immigration officials say is utterly untrue. The course, based at Seneca College, can take up to three years to complete, and can cost a student well over $110,000. The program is being offered by the Overseas Canadian Edu- cation Foundation (OCEF), run by di- rector Kelly Sullivan. Liz Patterson, director of the University of Toronto’s International Student Center, was approached by OCEF representatives several weeks ago. She refused their request to put up posters advertising the program. “I've looked at their material and it seems very much to be a money-making scheme.” “As a matter of policy, we don’t co-operate with any venture that charges money because we don’t think they're necessary. Most of the advice and counselling they [visa students] need is available for free,” Patterson said. “We don’t let them put posters up. We don’t want it to seem like we are endorsing any of these groups,” she added. Elayne Lockhart, manager at the office of international education at Cen- tennial College, was also approached by an OCEF representative and refused per- mission for the group to advertise. However, she later found the group put their posters up anyway. “We don’t want them to put up the posters. It looks like we endorse it then. It looks like we're saying ‘spend your money here’” said Lockhart. Ads have also been put up at Humber Col- lege and Ryerson University. OCEF'’s ads claim that with this program, visa students can “directly im- migrate to Canada in as little as 10 weeks” and that “no business back- ground is required.” These claims are apparently false. According to Immigration Canada spokesperson Wendy Bontinen, applicants applying through the Busi- ness Immigration Program must have business experience as well as business skills. “The Business Immigration Pro- gram stresses previous business experi- ence as well as business skills,” she said. Also, direct immigration in 10 weeks is not likely. Under Canadian law, one must apply from a foreign country. “I know of no immigration program where someone can apply from within Canada. There are some exceptions made on humanitarian and compassion- ate grounds, but these are not com- mon,” said Bontinen. “Tt usually takes at least a few months to do all the background checks. There is no such thing as guaranteed immigration,” she said. Bontinen also criticized private immigration programs for charging ex- orbitant amounts for information that can be obtained at no cost. “All the ad- vice that is needed to apply is available at Immigration Canada offices for free.” Included in OCEF’s advertising is a copy of a letter from the office of the Ministry of Employment and Im- migration which states the Foreign Study Immigration Program has “a great deal of merit and will assist immigrants in qualifying under the Business Immi- gration Program.” The ad claims this is a letter of approval from the govern- ment. But ministerial aide Denzil Minnan-Wong, who wrote the letter, claims he was not giving the program his approval. “The letter as it was being used was a misrepresentation. If people read the letter carefully, they will see that the minister's office, unequivocally and ab- solutely, does not give any sort of ap- proval, nor does it endorse it,” said Minnan-Wong. He said he has contacted OCEF and requested the letter no longer be used. Sullivan said some of the early advertisements may have contained some errors. “We're not lawyers. We have may have unintentionally made a few mistakes but we have corrected them in our new information packets,” he said. Sullivan insists his group is genuine. November 16, 1993 “The program has been called innovative and has been well received by everyone who's seen it,” he said. “We are filling a gap that private and public sector schools aren’t. We provide ori- entation and education at the college level.” “Sure, there are school coun- sellors, but there are several hundred students and usually only one or two counsellors.” Sullivan defended the high tuition fees the OCEF charges. “To a Canadian citizen, it may seem a little high, but that’s because they’re used to paying $2,000, $3,000 per year in tuition. Visa students pay around $10,000 for two-thirds of a year at colleges in Canada. Our tuition is only $15,600 for a full year.” Sullivan failed to mention that OCEF also charges $11,400 per year for business training fees and a $28,400 fee for an “Immigration Package”. PaulTuz, Better Business Bureau president, agreed OCEF's costs were exorbitant. “We've seen this sort of gim- mick before. In the past, there have been companies that offer job preparation programs, but I've never seen one for this much [money],” saidTuz. “I’m sure there are one or two very good compa- nies, but the vast majority offer serv- ices that the people can easily do for themselves.” Minnan-Wong said Immigra- tion Canada officials are currently in- vestigating the group, but declined to give further details. UBC students sit in trees for three months by Graham Cook VANCOUVER (CUP) -- The protesters sat in trees for three months non-stop, until the courts ordered them down -- but they haven't given up. The logging of a forested area south of the University of British Co- lumbia is going ahead full steam now that the protesters are out of the trees. The issue has become bigger than the new building site which necessitates the logging. It goes to the very heart of who controls university campuses. The latest struggle erupted over a new campus plan presented by the university administration in June. The plan was developed with almost no pub- lic input, and proposed new roads through student family housing, new non-student market housing, and the logging of forested areas for new build- ings on the perimeter of a campus that is already one of the biggest in Canada. The most contentious new de- velopment was an area slated to be logged and developed into a forest and mining engineering centre to be run by the National Research Council (NRC). The new building was pre- sented as a virtual fait accompli to com- munity groups and the local native group, the Musqueam, who have an University unions may join forces by Aaron Paulson TORONTO (CUP) -- A merger of two national unions could give teaching as- sistants and non-tenured professors greater power across Canada. Current talks could lead to a merger between the 11,000 members of the Canadian Union of Education Workers (CUEW), and the 3,000 mem- . bers of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE). “The amount of resources at CUPE's disposal... would lead to greater integration with the labor movement in the rest of the country,” said Sean DiGiovanna, a representative for CUEW Local 2, which represents 3,000 teach- ing assistants and ‘student lecturers at the University of Toronto. The merger carries other po- tential benefits to CUEW members, beyond increased solidarity with work- ers at other campuses. “CUEW provides a large amount of services to its locals. CUPE is known as a union that grants a lot of local autonomy,” said DiGiovanna. He added that CUPE may have greater re- sources nationally, but those resources may or may not be as available to each local. The proposed merger is at least partially a reaction to the threat of leg- islated wage and employment cuts in the public sector. “There is a social con- tract in Ontario, Manitoba has a similar program, and it is currently being de- bated in Nova Scotia and Alberta,” said Derek Blackadder, executive assistant to the national committee at CUEW. Both CUPE and CUEW have ap- proached each other in the past about a potential merger. Current talks began this August, but are not expected to reach a conclusion until next spring. CUEW will have representatives at the CUPE national convention in Novem- ber, to observe the union in action. “CUEW is taking the merger discussions very seriously, but they are still in their early stages,” said Blackadder. “We're being very careful at first;” DiGiovanna said. “One of our top priorities is to ensure the same level of services to the locals,” as provided by the CUEW national office. The Merger Discussions Com- mittee will make a report to the execu- tive body, after which a national refer- endum will take place to vote on the Committee’s proposals. outstanding claim on the parkland sur- rounding UBC. In response, the diverse interest groups formed COUP, the Coa- lition Opposed to the University Plan. The activist coalition tried to negotiate with the UBC administration over the plan, but the NRC site remained essentially unchanged. In response sev- eral tree-sitters set up platforms in three of the large second-growth trees on the site. They sat in the trees for three months, until the administration threat- ened a civil suit that has been labelled by activists as a SLAPP -- a Strategic Law- suit Against Public Participation. SLAPPs "have little chance of ultimately succeeding in court but it costs so much to defend against that it really discourages the defendants from getting involved,” said Ken Wu of the UBC Student Environment Centre. The UBC suit would have called for huge damages and would have al- lowed the courts to seize the assets of a long list of protestors, including "Jane Doe." The COUP protestors decided the financial risk to protestors was too great, and the tree platforms were vacated. And since then the trees have been coming down, with more than 100 cut so far for the NRC site. Several of the protestors still see the environmental value of the site as paramount. "This is just about the larg- est urban forest in Canada," said Can- tor. "With the pollution levels getting to the level where the local government is telling people not to use their cars, it seems crazy that we're cutting down one of the largest urban lungs there is." But while campus activists have lost the en- vironmental battle over this particular site, they feel they have broadened the terms of the debate to more than just trees. "We've got to make sure noth- ing like the NRC siting ever happens again. We've got to make sure that all decision-making happens not behind closed doors but with all our participa- tion,” said Charlotte Vimtrup, a co- founder of the Coalition Opposed to the University Plan (COUP). "We are the stakeholders in this university -- it's our university, not [UBC president] Strangway's,” Vimtrup said. Many COUP plotters are more concerned with the broader questions of who controls the university. The bat- tle lines at UBC, as at many other cam- puses, have been drawn by those who support direct corporate involvement in research and development against those who see independent scholarship and “the public interest" as paramount. Nancy Horsman, a 66-year-old student and long-time activist, was at the NRC site near the end of the pro- test, when UBC security and loggers were intimidating the protestors off the site. "This is land that was given in trust by the people of BC to the university, to expand on for academic reasons. I don't think they ever envisioned a huge real estate corporation development that would gut the forest and put in an elit- ist grad studies engineering complex," Horsman told the security guards as they asked her to leave the site. Horsman also criticized the claim that the NRC centre, which would house research on robotics for the for- estry and mining industries, would "create jobs." The sort of technology to be developed there would actually eliminate jobs and replace them with machines, Horsman said. While the federally-funded NRC has been criticized for focussing too much on short term, profit-oriented research, it still has some claim to in- dependence from corporate concerns - - unlike some other new campus resi- dents. A company called Forintek, jointly funded by BC's major logging companies, has built its own privately- owned research centre on the UBC grounds and conducts research specifi- cally tied to developing new wood prod- ucts and improving cutting techniques. But corporations can only set up shop with a supportive university ad- ministration, say protestors. COUP has criticized the largely unchecked power of the university administration to con- trol what happens on campus. For ex- ample, under the BC universities act the administration is not tied to the same planning regulations as exist in the City of Vancouver. Wu said concerned students have to make sure the administration keeps its promises. "What we want peo- ple to do is to make sure that the ad- ministration makes their decisions and drafts their plans in conjunction with the input of all the students who pay their fees here, with the residents of the area and with the faculty," Wu said.