Commentary The pandemic has brought a financial day of reckoning clearly into focus for Canada’s universities. The immediate crisis comes from a collapse in revenue from declining foreign student enrolment. But the plunge in foreign student numbers is just the revenue side of the challenges; there are significant spending problems as well. University revenues mainly come from government and tuition fees, according to Statistics Canada’s 2018–19 data. These revenues mainly fund compensation—salaries, wages, and benefits—which amounted to 59 percent of total expenditures that year. With the strength of unions behind them, compensation in universities skyrocketed compared to the private sector. Within the tuition fee portion of those revenues in 2018–19, over one-third came from international students, who pay substantially higher tuition than domestic students. In 2020–21, foreign undergraduate students paid an average annual tuition of $32,000, compared to just $6,600 for domestic students. Statistics Canada estimates that foreign students paid …