We can assume that Pierre Fitzgibbon will quickly return to his duties as Minister of Economy and Innovation within the next CAQ government and we can also hope that he will assume the political leadership necessary to tackle the problem of shortage of manpower which threatens to further undermine Quebec’s economic development.
Posted at 6:30 a.m.
The day after October 3, the major Quebec employer associations all congratulated Premier François Legault and the Coalition avenir Québec on their re-election, but they also immediately insisted that the next government place the problem of the labor shortage -work at the top of his list of priorities.
Whether it is the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal, Manufacturers and Exporters of Quebec (MEQ) or the Federation of Quebec Chambers of Commerce (FCCQ), the organizations that represent Quebec businesses are imploring the next government to give priority to the labor shortage.
In his words of congratulations, the president of the FCCQ, Charles Milliard, reminds François Legault that there are, according to the latest data available, 271,000 positions to be filled in Quebec.
In her message to the next government, Véronique Proulx, CEO of MEQ, specifies that 31,985 manufacturing jobs are currently vacant, a shortage that has a direct impact on the economic spinoffs in the region, on the postponement of investments and on the disruptions in supply chains.
To meet these crying needs, there are no 36 solutions, Quebec must increase – at least temporarily – the reception of new immigrants beyond the threshold of 50,000 prescribed in an extremely rigid manner by François Legault.
If Premier Legault has remained inflexible about this absolute threshold of 50,000 new immigrants per year in recent months, it was, can we understand, so as not to erode his electoral base and not to worry certain voters who persist in believing that the stranger poses a threat to them and their way of life.
However, in the same way that François Legault ignored during his first mandate his promise to review the voting system in Quebec and no longer feels at all bound by this commitment today, the Prime Minister will have to broaden his views on the immigration as well as on the threshold of new arrivals which will allow businesses to find some available labour.
Fitzgibbon knows it and he can
If there is anyone who knows how much Quebec desperately needs new blood to regenerate its worker base, it is Pierre Fitzgibbon. Over the past four years, as Minister of Economy and Innovation, he has worked daily with dozens of entrepreneurs who have told him and repeated the issues and threats they face.
Every time he’s been called on for the past four years to comment on the labor shortage, Minister Fitzgibbon’s face tended to twitch a little before he responded by toeing the leader’s line: automation and the digitization of industrial processes will make it possible to increase the productivity of companies, reduce their labor needs and increase the level of wealth.
Ultimately, this equation becomes possible when a company or a sector of activity reaches a level of maturity that will allow it to make this quantitative leap, but to get there, it is necessary to maintain a level of employment that is only increasing. erode with the retirement of more than 150,000 workers per year.
Pierre Fitzgibbon has a certain ascendancy over François Legault who has forgiven him many times for the very great permissiveness with which he has interpreted certain codes of conduct with which an elected official must comply. I meet business leaders every week and they all tell me the same thing that they must also tell the Minister: “We are short of people, we urgently need new blood. »
Recently, in northern Quebec, the mayor of Matagami went even further by stating that the region was simply short of humans, that at least 400 families had to quickly settle there in order to be able to keep the infrastructure alive.
The next Minister of Economy and Innovation must therefore absolutely take into account in his development vision the expansion of the pool of available talent if Québec is to achieve its full growth potential.
The Minister will have to show leadership to convince the Premier and the CAQ caucus of the urgency of the issue in order to quickly increase the number of people available and willing to work in order to prevent the Quebec economy from suffering even longer deleterious effects of the talent shortage that afflicts it.