Quebec will “soon” announce its new requirements on the knowledge of French for economic immigrants, but also for temporary workers, Prime Minister François Legault said on Tuesday.
“There are a lot of temporary workers and we have to ask ourselves questions about what we are doing to protect French. Not only for the permanent ones, but for the temporary ones, ”declared the chief caquiste during a scrum at the National Assembly.
Mr. Legault has already declared that he wants Quebec to select 100% of French-speaking economic immigrants by 2026.
“We will soon announce that for the first time in the history of Quebec, we will put requirements concerning the knowledge of French for economic immigrants,” he added.
The Prime Minister refused to say whether the desire to have 100 million inhabitants in Canada by 2100—as suggested by the group “The initiative of the century”—constitutes a threat for Quebec.
“I want to be very clear, there is no question in Quebec that we will have such a growth in immigration over the next few years, however reacted Mr. Legault. First of all, it’s important to say it, it’s like that, then it must stay like that, it’s Quebec that must decide on its own the number of permanent immigrants we receive each year. »
Earlier in the day, the leader of the Parti Québécois, Paul St-Pierre Plamondon, referred to this initiative by speaking of “occult things organized between [la firme] McKinsey and Justin Trudeau”. According to him, if not “official” in Ottawa, this policy is “effective” and must be subject to debate.
It is neither more nor less than a “democratic dispossession”, an “inability to debate important choices for our future”, he said sorry.
Debates on temporary immigration
In a scrum, Québec solidaire and the Liberal Party alternately asked the Minister of Immigration, Christine Fréchette, to take temporary immigration into account in the debates on immigration thresholds.
It has so far refused to do so.
“There is no reason not to get these people out of their precarious status, except the ideological obstinacy to respect a threshold of 50,000 [immigrants permanents] that we promised in the election for somewhat superficial reasons since it is not based on any serious study, ”declared solidarity Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois.
“Today, what we are asking is to stop this big lie and to talk about the real figures. It’s 300,000 [immigrants non permanents]. It’s no longer 50,000 or 40,000,” said liberal Monsef Derraji.
He himself said he intended to discuss the immigration threshold that his party would like to put in place in light of the new data on temporary immigration. “Is it 70,000?” Is it more? Is it less? These figures must be reassessed in the light [de la nouvelle réalité] added his fellow acting party leader, Marc Tanguay.
“And we are obviously asking the government, in complete transparency, for a debate that takes into account the explosion” in the number of non-permanent immigrants, he added.