Are they actually from China or more so Hong Kong. Just askin'
Most from China.
In many Canadian universities, foreign students make up to half of the student body. Half of those foreign students are from China. Foreign students' tuition is 10 times that of provincial residents. If Chinese students went home, some universities would have serious funding problems. In fact, some canadian universities are actively seeking foreign students to make up shortfalls in government funding.
That's just one example of the downside to Trudeau clinging to the so called rule of law.
Other than that, China does not need Canadian exports, especially those that the US wants to keep away:
Softwood lumber (large US tariffs)
Oil (don't want pipelines)
Milk (milk producers sold out by Freeland)
Lobsters by the 747 load (they'll find a mysterious virus as a pretext to bar them, the same kind of pretext Japan used to keep Canadian beef away for many years)
That is going to hurt a lot of medium businesses and workers. And its going to be just the beginning.
This 'rule-of-law' business is utter bullshit. The US is a prosecutorial state, and district attorneys and judges are elected. Higher court judges are appointed by the party in power and tend to be biased by politics. The judiciary is used by corporations and hostile investors in order to either grab control of corporations (as what happened with Conrad Black and the corporation he built from scratch, Hollinger) or shut out the competition by laying bogus charges on foreign corporations and their executives. A prosecutor just has to find a judge with a certain political leaning to tie them up for years of procedural delay. The judge that approved the request for extradition for Meng was from a Republican/Trump hostile district in NY.
That's what you get when, in order to get the right appearances, when you select cabinet ministers based on their gender, rather than on their competence. Freeland has a personal beef with Russia because of her family's historical background, and she has naturally sided herself with US neocons, who also happen to be anti Russia. This hate against Russia also put her generally against China, since both are allied and Russia has a communist legacy. Plus, being quite vain, seems to relish the photo shoots with US political heavyweights l like Pompeo.
What has happened is not what Canada was all about. Canada always had a geopolitical foreign policy that was generally not tied to that of the US, and Canada was not afraid to stand up to the US:
Canada always maintained ties to Cuba
Chretien refused to send our troops to Dubya Bush's Iraq war (Harper would have done so)
Canada did not participate in the Vietnam war (Australia did, including sending conscripts)
LBJ grabbed Lester B Pearson's throat, pushing him against the wall
Nixon called PE Trudeau an Asshole.
Canada initiated overtures towards China while the US was very hostile to the Commie Yellow Peril. Trudeau the father would now be rolling in his grave.
Now, we're pandering to US geopolitics and, while getting nothing in return, are actually getting screwed by the US on trade.
That's the idiocy of the Trudeau government: all about appearances, and don't give a shit about the upcoming hit on Canadian commercial interests and jobs.
The only hope Trudeau has in coming out of this mess without too much political and economic damage, is for Trump to sign an executive order, cancelling the extradition request. But then, Freeland the idiot, was telling Trump to mind his own business. That's how bad our present government is.