While the Trudeau government is proposing to reform its Official Languages Act in the face of the failure of its language policy, which has resulted in the irresistible assimilation of Francophones outside Quebec, Ottawa is helping to strengthen the use of English at work by selecting tens of thousands of temporary foreign workers who do not know French. The Quebec government has no say.
Ottawa currently administers two major temporary foreign worker programs. For the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (PTET), the candidate must obtain a Quebec Acceptance Certificate issued by the Ministère de l’Immigration, de la Francisation et de l’Intégration (MIFI) before the work permit is issued. be granted by Ottawa. The other gateway is the International Mobility Program (IMP), which is the sole responsibility of Ottawa. The Quebec government does not know who the workers arriving under the PMI are and only learns their number after the fact.
In recent years, the number of workers selected exclusively by Ottawa through the PMI has jumped, while the TFWP has remained stable. The PMI represents 70% of foreign workers on Quebec soil, more than two and a half times the number of workers recruited by the PTET. Nearly half of PMI workers do not speak French and are therefore unable to work in this language.
The number of foreign students has also increased sharply in recent years. There are now 90,800, according to the latest MIFI data. A large proportion of these students attend English-speaking institutions: 43% in the case of English-language universities, which account for 25% of university student numbers in Quebec. As for CEGEPs, just over half of foreign students attend English-language colleges.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) discriminates against French-speaking international students, particularly against students from Africa. The refusal rate for foreign students, accepted by Laval University, for example, is 50%, compared to 8% for McGill University.
The way of selecting immigrants has changed considerably since the signing of the Canada-Quebec agreement on immigration in 1991, an agreement that allows the Quebec government to choose 65% of immigrants. The newcomers, for the most part, are no longer selected abroad; they are already here. Today, Canada relies on the channels of temporary workers and students to meet the bulk of its immigration needs. Quebec is not to be outdone: only 15% of so-called economic immigrants are abroad when they are selected.
Without coordinating with Quebec as required by the agreement, the Trudeau government has opened the immigration floodgates wide: the threshold will increase to 451,000 newcomers, to which must be added a growing number of temporary workers and foreign students.
At present, IRCC is not sufficient for the task. In Quebec, the delay for the federal administration to grant permanent resident status is 30 months — delays are much shorter in the rest of the country. The system is dysfunctional and files are piling up. At the beginning of the year, there were 90,000 CSQ holders who were waiting for Ottawa to process their file.
The more time passes, the more it seems that this is a deliberate strategy to force Quebec to raise its immigration thresholds, which it persists in maintaining at 50,000 newcomers a year.
Friday, delivering his assessment of the parliamentary session, François Legault reiterated his desire to obtain more powers in immigration. However, Quebec has not exercised all the powers conferred on it by the Canada-Quebec agreement. According to the federal negotiator of the agreement, André Burelle, who spoke in the pages of the To have to, it is a quasi-constitutional agreement of division of responsibilities, and not a simple administrative agreement of delegation of powers. This agreement would allow the Quebec government to provide measures to facilitate the francization of spouses resulting from family reunification. Quebec could impose language requirements on temporary workers and limit the influx of foreign students into English-speaking establishments. Instead of banging its nose at a refusal from the federal government, the Legault government should fight to exploit all the possibilities offered by the Canada-Quebec agreement.