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Campaigns to attract foreign students and their money to Canadian campuses are increasingly assertive.

Even though Higher Education Minister Andrew Wilkinson proudly says B.C. already has a third of this country’s 330,000 foreign students, efforts are escalating to bring in more, especially to Metro Vancouver.

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The city’s universities and colleges are paying millions of dollars to agents around the world to sign up student recruits for their programs. Developers like Toby Chu are planning 50-storey towers in Surreyto house more foreign students.

University officials are excited that, with the election of immigration-wary Donald Trump as U.S. president, foreign-student interest in Canada is soaring, even while Canada already has three times as many foreign students per capita as the U.S.

With foreign students bringing an estimated $8 billion a year into the Canadian economy, many officials applaud the way they spend on retail goods and rent, create teaching jobs, add to campus “diversity” and offset declining government education budgets.