Demographic emergency | From “job thieves” to saviors

Struggling with a labor shortage, Quebec could experience the end of the natural increase in its population and see the deaths supplanting births within ten years, unprecedented in its history. Is there a solution without immigration?

Nicolas Berube
Press

What growth without births?

Without the contribution of immigration, Quebec is doomed to see its population decrease. “Look at the depopulated villages of Abitibi, the Côte-Nord… Who wants such a destiny for Quebec? »Asks an expert.

Having children is more and more difficult. Food, accommodation, transport: everything costs more. Modern life takes us away from the conditions required to have large families, and so births will continue to decline.

These are the conclusions of an alarming report written in 1930 by the Swedish research couple Gunnar and Alva Myrdal. He was an economist, she was a sociologist. They would later each win a Nobel Prize for their work.

Their recommendations? The government should help families by providing them with the services they need.

“Free education, health care and, later, subsidized daycare to allow women to work: all this goes back to this fear of seeing the population decrease because of a drop in the birth rate”, explains Benoit Laplante, professor at the Center Urbanization Culture Société of the National Institute for Scientific Research in Montreal. “This is the birth of the Swedish model. “

Almost a century later, the drop in the birth rate is more glaring than ever, especially in developed countries. In Quebec, the number of deaths could exceed the number of births in just a decade.

At the same time, the labor shortage is making headlines almost every day.

As many as 55% of entrepreneurs nationwide struggle to recruit the employees they need, forcing them to work longer hours and postpone or turn down orders, recent Business Development Bank analysis reports. of Canada (BDC).

Previously denounced as “job thieves”, immigrants have seen their image take a 180-degree turn in the popular imagination: they are now seen as part of the solution to this demographic emergency. This fall, Quebec is looking to recruit more than 4,000 healthcare workers abroad, mostly nurses – numbers never seen before.

More than 1.4 million positions will be available in Quebec by 2028, according to data from the most recent Immigration Summit held in Quebec in October, notes Victor Piché, honorary professor in the demography department of the University of Montreal.

Nationalism versus immigration

Society has made two fundamental choices, notes Victor Piché: it has decided to have fewer children, and it has decided to implement an economic model based on growth.

“Those who want to lower the immigration thresholds in order to preserve the ‘French-Canadian’ ethnicity of Quebec must explain to us what economic model they intend to adopt, because the largely dominant model in Quebec society is contradictory with such a choice”, he said.

To see how a society operates with fewer residents and fewer workers, all you have to do is look at Abitibi or the Côte-Nord, notes Mr. Piché.

“The villages which have become depopulated because there is no future there for young people… That is the future of a society which sees its population and its economic growth diminish. Who wants such a fate for Quebec? I have never heard anyone defend such an idea. ”

To those who believe that immigration will change the fundamental makeup of society, the demographer replies they are right. “And it’s already done, anyway. Even if we stopped immigration today, this diversity is there, and it will remain. “

According to Mia Homsy, President and CEO of the Institut du Québec (IDQ), the notion of immigrants seen as competitors for coveted jobs no longer holds water.

This does not mean that we have to dramatically increase the immigration thresholds, because there is still higher unemployment among immigrants than among natives, notes Mia Homsy, adding that it is impossible to cancel completely. the effect of the drop in birth rates in Quebec.

“The best we can do is to blur the most glaring effects in certain sectors for essential services, with immigration, and also with the fact of making older people work … And again, that will take some organization, it will not happen on its own. ”

Administrative deadlines

Until 30 or 40 years ago, immigrants were seen as workers who came to help out in boom times. “It was one-off, it was the logic behind immigration,” notes Benoit Laplante. Today, that’s not it at all. ”

There is now a “political battle” on the issue of immigration in Canada, and even more so in Quebec, because of the linguistic situation, he says.

However, until now, the argument often conveyed of a decrease in the use of French does not worry Victor Piché.

“The latest statistics from the Office de la langue française are not alarming. We want a society where French dominates in the public sphere, and that is the reality. For example, the language spoken by people at home is not the right indicator to measure the state of French. Of course, non-francophones will speak a language other than French at home. It’s mathematical. Are people going to be able to learn and speak French? The answer is yes. Work in French? The answer is yes. And bilingualism, for me, is not negative. French is not threatened because people are bilingual. Once again, on this issue, we paint ourselves in the corner. ”

On this subject, Mia Homsy notes that the Legault government “holds a somewhat more nationalist speech” and campaigned on the idea of ​​reducing immigration, while in fact, the actions it is taking are not very different from those of the government that preceded it.

“The current government is targeting a threshold of 50,000 immigrants per year. If we add the catching up of the delay taken during the pandemic, the increase in temporary immigration and the number of international students, we see that the government is already working to implement the solution. ”

The problem is more in terms of administrative delays, which are starting to have a significant impact on people’s decisions to stay in Quebec or to go elsewhere in Canada. “It’s so long that international students recruited from abroad go to Ontario, British Columbia… Therein lies the problem. ”

Not treated at their fair value

Also, many immigrants do not work at their fair value in Quebec, and are hitting walls both in the labor market and in the world of education, where their diplomas and experience are not recognized, deplores Victor Piché.

“When we talk about the famous systemic discrimination, that’s part of it. The hiring mechanisms do not fully empower immigrants. The impact of immigration could be much more positive if we made better use of this workforce. ”

There is also a lot of talk these days about the importance of bringing in temporary workers. Mr. Piché noted that these workers should be offered a path that would allow them to access permanent residence.

“It’s like saying to them, ‘We need you guys, but we don’t want you to stay.’ We are creating a two-tier immigration policy. Less qualified workers, if we allowed them to circulate within the labor market, they could meet a lot of needs, whereas for the moment, they are not allowed to do so, because they are attached to a single employer, and do not can work here only for four years. The employers themselves complain about this system, which is limiting. There is work to be done on that side. “

Family policies, a failure?

In a report titled Birth rate and public interventions published in 2004, the Ministère de l’Emploi, de la Solidarité sociale et de la Famille du Québec concluded that “public interventions can influence the realization of the desire for a child”.

The report suggested that the government take inspiration from Scandinavia for its family policies, particularly in terms of parental leave and subsidized childcare.

The fertility index was then 1.4 children per family in Quebec. Fifteen years later, after rising slightly, it is at 1.5, and appears to be on a downward slope. In all cases, we are far from the index of 2.1 children per family, ie the threshold for renewal of a population.

Should we conclude that the programs implemented since have been a failure? Not at all, answers Benoit Laplante, professor at the Center Urbanization Culture Société of the National Institute for Scientific Research in Montreal.

“Since the start of the implementation of family policy measures in Quebec in 1997, Quebec has overtaken Ontario in terms of fertility and in terms of women’s activity rate. So it works, ”he says, adding that family policies are about helping families, not about raising the birth rate.

Pessimism pointed out

Since the economic crisis of 2008, developed countries have seen a drop in fertility, and Quebec is no exception.

The hypothesis that has the wind in the sails among demographers, he says, is that from 2008, a pessimism about the role of the state, the prospect of improving economic conditions and precariousness has settled in the West.

“It’s a hypothesis, it’s very difficult to verify, but research is underway, especially in Finland. Finland has a birth rate of 1.35, one of the lowest in the developed world.

The whole reasoning behind family policies is based on the idea that people want to have children, and that society empowers them to have them while reducing the cost.

“The big question now is, ‘Do people still want to have children? And how much ?” We are there. Research projects on this question are more necessary than ever. “