By the end of the election campaign, the editorial team of the To have to will offer an analysis of the main commitments of political parties on themes that concern all Quebecers. Today: immigration.
For most of the election campaign, the debate on immigration was limited to a matter of thresholds in the reception of newcomers. The unfortunate remarks of the CAQ leader, François Legault, who presented immigration as a threat to social peace, before apologizing, unnecessarily colored the discussions.
For the outgoing Prime Minister, it would have been so simple to rise above the fray and to recall, without sacrificing the protection of the Quebec nation, that Quebec is a land of welcome rich in its diversity and its cultural mixes. His clumsiness means that the reasoned positions and achievements of the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) in the area of immigration attract suspicion.
The CAQ proposes, among other things, to welcome 50,000 immigrants a year and to require that a greater proportion of them already speak French when they arrive. Mr. Legault makes it an essential condition for ensuring the future of French in Quebec, because there are limits to the speed of integration of immigrants into the Francophone fabric and culture. His government doubled the budgets allocated to francization to $168 million per year, an excellent initiative that suffers from inequalities in the quality and accessibility of training. The Quebec state does not even know how many companies take part in francization courses. There are many inconsistencies, as evidenced by the recent case of Peerless’ exemplary francization program, whose funding was withdrawn and then renewed following a report by the To have to.
It is to be hoped that the creation of Francisation Québec will serve to improve the balance sheet. Quebec can and must do better in terms of integration and francization if we wish to address the debate on immigration beyond linguistic insecurity.
The Parti Québécois (PQ) also considers the thresholds of immigration under the sign of the durability of the French fact. Its leader, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, lowers the target to 35,000 immigrants per year and requires knowledge of French from all economic immigrants before their arrival. He is the only one, with François Legault, to link immigration and the durability of French without going through the illusory shortcut of the labor shortage.
The Conservative Party of Quebec (PCQ) joins the PQ on the horrors of multiculturalism, but it exceeds it on the right by proposing to select immigrants according to a “civilizational compatibility” (adhesion to Western values and capacity for integration) . This nostalgia for a fantasized social cohesion is coated in an appalling determinism that ignores the human being’s capacities for integration and adaptation.
At the other end of the spectrum, Québec solidaire (QS) sets the maximum target at 80,000 immigrants per year, without worrying too much about the consequences. The co-spokesperson for QS, Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, has the happy idea of proposing an additional increase in francization budgets (to 230 million per year) and of wanting to introduce Quebec culture to newcomers through a “post culture” of $200 per year. The measure may seem trivial, but it has the merit of offering an outstretched hand.
The Liberal Party of Quebec (PLQ) is relying on its usual good-natured approach to immigration, in line with its historical position in favor of minority rights. Dominique Anglade does not suffer from any linguistic insecurity. His invitation to “stop dividing” and presenting immigration as “a problem and a threat” is soothing in comparison to Mr. Legault’s dubious amalgams. However, it ignores the solutions needed to facilitate the language transfer of newcomers to French. She evokes without too much conviction the francization and the regionalization of immigration, which she presents as a solution to the labor shortage (just like Québec solidaire). This causal relationship between immigration and employment is not unanimous.
By dint of dealing with the question of immigration based on the reception capacities of Quebec, we tend to forget that the real problem is in Ottawa, where there is a post-national Prime Minister who embraces a project of demographic growth based on the migratory contribution. Justin Trudeau’s Liberals do not respect the Canada-Quebec agreement on immigration. The federal migration process disadvantages Francophones, particularly among foreign students. All of the federal government’s actions on immigration lead us to conclude that it does not care about the declining demographic weight of francophones in Quebec and Canada.
The repatriation of full powers in immigration is the measure that matters most, but none of the parties will be in a position to succeed in this tour de force. This is our real immigration drama.