Quebec is currently surveying civil society to establish its immigration thresholds. Do we need 50,000 or 60,000 per year? These figures mean nothing, the business community responded on Thursday. “The reception capacity is not actually based on anything,” says the Quebec Employers’ Council.
The business community “sometimes comes up against a certain wall of opacity” when it comes to immigration, Charles Milliard of the Federation of Quebec Chambers of Commerce (FCCQ) argued Thursday during the government’s general consultation on the subject.
A government immigration dashboard is needed to clarify the portrait of these new arrivals, as the Ministry of Health is doing. Without this, he continues, “we are in a debate that is far too emotional, not scientific enough.”
A few minutes earlier, the Employers’ Council was in the same direction. The threshold of 60,000 immigrants per year in Quebec is only a floor. The ceiling must be determined by “the labor market”.
“The reception capacity is what we can give ourselves,” argued its president, Karl Blackburn. “Unfortunately, in some cases, people have a vision on reception capacity; thinking that these people come to consume public services and do not contribute to the development of our society. We are the opposite, we think that reception capacity is not actually based on anything. Immigrant workers, yes, can come and consume services, but can contribute significantly to our ability to deploy services. »
The FCCQ has set out a few indicators that would clarify this capacity for integration: access to housing, access to French courses, access to public transportation, access to a daycare service, access to a family doctor.
“What we need is to have clear data,” summarized Alexandre Gagnon, vice-president of labor and human capital at the FCCQ. “If today we are short 500 housing units in a region and we make major investments, what will the repercussions be in a year? What will the repercussions be in two years? Have the investments we made achieved the results? »
Manufacturers and Exporters of Quebec closed this day of hearing by also suggesting “clear parameters on what we mean by capacity [d’accueil] » while advancing a threshold well beyond the options proposed by Quebec. These representatives of Quebec factories are asking for a threshold of 90,000 people “to mitigate the impacts of the labor shortage”.
This report is supported by the Local Journalism Initiative, funded by the Government of Canada.