Walrus journalist Nicholas Hune-Brown retraces the steps that led to his ground-breaking investigation—probing exploitative recruitment practices in Canada’s international education industry while chronicling the first-hand experiences of students whose reality in Canada was far from the promise they were sold
By Levon William Enns-Kutcy, Chris Arsenault, Josette Lafleur and Angeline Gissoni
While reading a Toronto Star story about a rooming-house fire that claimed the life of an 18-year-old international student at the University of Toronto, journalist Nicholas Hune-Brown was struck by a single detail: the young woman had been recruited to the university by her landlord’s husband.
That matchstick clue sparked bigger questions: What systems were putting students in such precarious positions—and why?
As Hune-Brown dug deeper, he uncovered a shadowy world of education agents—profit-driven middlemen contracted by universities to recruit international students for commission. The realization was stark: to universities, international students weren’t clients but commodities.
Through more than two dozen interviews, he set out to find a student from India who had not only navigated the recruitment pipeline, but could also tell their story with vivid detail—conveying both the everyday realities and the emotional hardships of their experiences in Canada.
Leveraging distance reporting, rich descriptions—and a well-measured weave of data and narrative, Nicholas Hune-Brown’s multi-award-winning report shows how careful research and storytelling can be just as impactful as leaked documents. Sitting down with Chris Arsenault, Josette Lafleur and Angeline Gissoni, he describes how he conducted his investigation.
Read the initial story in the Walrus.
To find out more about the project, visit How They Did It: The Tradecraft Behind Canadian Investigative Journalism.
The text of this interview has been edited for length and clarity:
Chris Arsenault: You’ve taken a classic investigative approach: telling one person’s story to illuminate a broader narrative. Can you tell me about the main characters in your piece, and how you found them?
Nicholas Hune-Brown: I got in touch with the international students through a variety of ways. Through immigration lawyers, through advocacy organizations, through a whole bunch of student WhatsApp groups.
I think finding the central character for this story took a long time. I spoke with tons and tons of students, first to try and understand the story I was telling. I wanted to hear about their common struggles and repeated themes.
It was a question of who to put at the centre of the story? Who had a dramatic story, best representative of the systemic issues at play? And who was able to tell their story in a way that would let me relay it to the readers.
Josette Lafleur: How many interviews did you conduct, and how long did the reporting take?
Nicholas Hune-Brown: It was a very unusual piece in terms of timeline. I must have done more than two dozen interviews. The process started in June 2018, and the piece came out in August 2021.
Josette Lafleur: Investigative pieces—especially on topics like this—don’t usually span three years. Were you looking for something specific?
Nicholas Hune-Brown: For about a year, life got in the way. The original story I pitched in 2018 was very different. It started with a Toronto Star article about a rooming house fire where an 18-year-old Chinese student died. One detail stuck with me: she’d been recruited by her landlord’s wife to study overseas. What struck me was that education agents abroad are paid by the universities. The students aren’t the clients—they’re the product.
At the time, China was Canada’s top source of international students, mostly through big schools like U of T. That was the story I originally pitched.
By 2019, the facts on the ground had changed. Indian students had become by far the largest cohort at Canadian universities and colleges—and they were primarily attending small community colleges.
My plan was to travel to India, report the story on the ground, and follow up with people I’d been interviewing over the phone—or find new subjects there. But that was just before late February 2020, when everything went into lockdown. For months, everything shut down, and the entire international student experience shifted.
I put the piece aside again, partly because there were so many other stories breaking about international students. When I finally picked it back up later that year, I ended up doing the bulk of the reporting from my bedroom, over the phone, with my two young kids running around.
That became the final piece. It could’ve come out earlier, but I think the delay made it stronger.
Chris Arsenault: I would have assumed you went to Punjab. Walk us through how you got that level of detail while reporting from your bedroom.
Nicholas Hune-Brown: You do as much research online as you can. Then you go back to your source repeatedly, trying to draw out a few more details each time.
I always tell interviewees I’m going to ask a bunch of specific questions—just say “I don’t remember” or “that’s silly,” and we’ll move on. Then I’d dig in and try to learn everything I could about it.
Josette Lafleur: Take me back to the first time you spoke with your story’s central character, Kushandeep Singh?
Nicholas Hune-Brown: It was a phone call—one of five that day. I was speaking to student after student from my bedroom. You’re always looking for someone who can describe their world and emotions clearly.
[Kushandeep] was soft-spoken, but very open and able to paint a picture of his home. He was nostalgic about where he came from and could really tell his own story. That’s what I remember most about him. He recalled specific things—like the billboards along the dusty road to school. And because I couldn’t go to India, I needed someone who could really help paint that picture.
Over the course of the pandemic, I spoke to him all the time. By the third or fourth conversation, Kushandeep would mention something, and I’d say, “That’s a place to slow down the narrative.” I’d have multiple phone calls about little details, about how things were progressing. I was keeping up with what he was doing. And over the course of a year, his story changed.
To be present for that arc felt important in this kind of reporting.
Josette Lafleur: This is such a difficult story—especially with themes of mental health and sexual exploitation. How did you navigate that?
Nicholas Hune-Brown: I didn’t rush these conversations. Kushandeep had experienced some traumatic things, but other students had gone through even more—sexual exploitation, losing relatives to suicide. That was difficult.
I was trying to think of how to balance that stuff. Not necessarily leading with the grabbiest, sensational details but trying to make sure what I was presenting was true to the bigger story and felt respectful.
Chris Arsenault: This was arguably the most ambitious version of this story to date looking at problems with Canada’s international student recruitment book. Do you think it helped spark any change?
Nicholas Hune-Brown: I definitely got more responses to this piece than anything else I’ve written—students, professors, people who’d lived through it and finally saw how it fit into a bigger picture.
This was more magazine journalism than uncovering a secret document. A lot of this stuff was public, so it was about bringing all of it into one place and shaping it into a narrative. That, I think, is what people actually responded to—and what was useful about it. I do think the story was read by policymakers.
This project is supported by the Michener–O’Hagan Fellowship for Journalism Education.
Steph Wechsler is J-Source's managing editor.