The labor shortage is François Legault’s worst enemy. However, since coming to power, the Prime Minister has been reluctant to draw his best weapon to defeat him: immigration.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
However, the data freshly extracted from the last census prove to what extent immigration is our lifeline, in a context where the fertility rate in Canada has never been so low. It is 1.4 children per woman, while 2.2 would be needed just to ensure the stability of the population.
The contribution of new arrivals is therefore essential to demographic growth, as the aging of the population is entering a critical phase.
Never has the number of people nearing retirement been so high. People aged 55 to 64, the tail end of the baby boom, represent more than one in five people in the working-age population.
Even if we find a way to convince them to postpone their retirement as long as possible, there will be fewer and fewer hands to work with. And there will be more and more services to provide, because the number of people aged 85 and over will triple in the next 25 years.
It doesn’t bode well. Already, emergency rooms are overflowing and services for seniors are cracking. In the health network, in schools, on construction sites… there is a lack of personnel everywhere!
Moreover, we learned on Friday that the unemployment rate had reached a historic low of 5.2% in Canada and 3.9% in Quebec. Quebec employers are tearing their hair out, with a record number of vacant positions.
We must therefore take a fresh look at immigration rather than getting bogged down in federal-provincial squabbles that are going nowhere.
We had a good example of this last week, when Justin Trudeau turned François Legault upside down like a pancake, on the sidelines of the announcement of the establishment of the Moderna factory in Montreal.
The Premier of Quebec demanded more power in matters of family reunification, an obsession of the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ). François Legault wants fluency in French to be an entry requirement for this category of immigrants, which comes under Ottawa. He sees it squarely as a “question of survival for the Quebec nation”. It’s not nothing.
Let’s put things in perspective.
Under the Canada-Quebec agreement, which is more than 30 years old, Quebec already selects three-quarters of its immigrants, mainly economic immigrants on whom it imposes its own criteria, particularly on language.
Quebec also takes care of refugees arriving from abroad. Is he closing the door in the face of Ukrainians on the pretext that they don’t speak French? Of course not ! It is therefore natural to show the same humanity in cases of family reunification.
In any case, these groups represent only 20% of immigration to Quebec. And contrary to what some suggest, this is not an open bar. A Canadian resident can only bring his spouse, his children under 22 and sometimes his parents if they have enough money.
So why make a big deal out of it when we know that immigrants from family reunification settle well in our country since they already have roots? They find themselves in fertile ground to integrate into the culture and learn French, which would be difficult to achieve, alone abroad, before their arrival.
Instead of this quibble of skills, why not a real debate on immigration thresholds?
Elected with the slogan “Take less, but take care of them”, the CAQ began its mandate by reducing the number of immigrants from 50,000 to 40,000 per year. It was like sawing off the lifeline of population growth.
Since then, the threshold has risen to 50,000 (not counting a catch-up of 18,000 due to the pandemic). But this represents only 12% of the 432,000 immigrants that Canada will welcome in 2022, a proportion half the size of Quebec’s weight within the country.
Some accuse Canada of wanting to drown Quebec. But it is up to the province to be more welcoming in order to maintain its economic and political weight.
It is still necessary that the federal government does not put a spoke in its wheels, as is the case at the moment. The bottleneck is such that economic immigrant applications that have already been accepted by Quebec take an average of 27 months to be processed on the federal side, which is four times longer than the processing time for applications from other provinces.
It’s a shame. You have to see it. And we have to think seriously about an acceptable immigration threshold, taking into account the ability of immigrants arriving in Quebec to integrate and learn French.
Let’s take more and take care of it. Otherwise the demographic imbalance will cause even more trouble in Quebec.