With the election campaign approaching and while the difficulties in recruiting workers persist, employer associations are once again urging the Legault government to raise the immigration thresholds and to make work more attractive, fiscally, for people of 60 years and over.
Posted at 6:33 p.m.
Four employer associations – the Conseil du patronat du Québec, the Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and Manufacturers and Exporters – met with representatives of Quebec political parties on Thursday to inform them their concerns about the labor shortage problem. They then met the press to air their grievances.
“The basic problem is that the pool of workers is not large enough,” said Véronique Proulx, of Manufacturers and Exporters.
Criticizing the government, she argued that “manufacturers feel left to themselves” with their labor recruitment problems.
She points out that manufacturers also hire a lot of temporary foreign workers, not just the agricultural sector.
For Karl Blackburn, of the Conseil du patronat du Québec, it is clear that the solution to the recruitment problem lies in raising the immigration thresholds. He evokes a threshold of 80,000; Mme Proulx even speaks of 90,000.
“It’s not a whim of employers,” says Blackburn, refuting criticism from observers who say employers just want low-wage labour.
He argues that there will be 1.4 million retirements by 2026 and that a way must be found to fill them. “It has nothing to do with the (COVID-19) pandemic. It’s related to our demographic curve,” says Mr. Blackburn.
But immigration thresholds aren’t the only solution to labor problems. We must also find a way to make work more attractive, in tax terms, for people aged 60 and over, they pleaded.
Even if these workers only work a day or two a week, it could help, argued Charles Milliard of the Federation of Quebec Chambers of Commerce.