To see the turn of the debate on immigration thresholds in Quebec, one would almost believe The Price Is Righta famous quiz game that has been on the air for 50 years.
Posted at 5:00 a.m.
Hearing the politicians throwing out figures on the number of immigrants the province should welcome, one imagines them in the audience of the program whose goal is to guess the price of an object, without exceeding it.
The first participant, François Legault, is counting on 50,000 immigrants per year, he who had reduced the threshold to 40,000, to respect his election promise of 2018, before reducing it to 50,000.
In an astonishing reversal of the situation, its Minister of Immigration, Jean Boulet, affirmed Thursday that it would be “reasonable” to raise this threshold to 58,000 people… to retract in the evening. Obviously, dissidence is not tolerated for long in the CAQ ranks.
For her part, the leader of the Liberal Party Dominique Anglade goes further. To combat the labor shortage, she estimates that the province must welcome 70,000 immigrants a year.
And the Quebec Employers Council is calling for between 80,000 and 100,000.
Who says better ?
Let’s be serious, immigration is not a game show. The host will not launch his famous “Come on down! to the participant closest to the magic number.
By thus advancing figures arbitrarily, according to partisan logic, we only camp positions and accentuate the social divide. It would be more useful to hold general meetings to establish Quebec’s real capacity for integration.
Because this famous capacity for integration remains a totally vague concept, even if it is proof of everything. Nobody knows on what criteria it is based. No one has ever measured it. No trace in the Immigration Plan where the Government of Quebec establishes its annual targets. Mystery and gumdrop.
The Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ), which had the good idea of presenting dashboards to measure the evolution of COVID-19 and the state of the health system, should do the same to monitor the key indicators of the immigration.
And we might have good surprises, because the integration of immigrants has improved considerably over the past 10 years, at least in the labor market. Judge for yourself…
The employment rate of immigrants who have been here for more than five years is now higher than that of people born here. The unemployment rate for immigrants is approaching that of natives, although a gap persists for more recent immigrants. And the average weekly earnings of immigrants have nearly caught up with those of native-born workers, except for more recent immigrants.
On the socio-cultural side, the situation is also less alarming than some believe. If immigrants continue to speak their mother tongue at home, which is quite natural, the situation is different in the public sphere, and that is what really matters.
Before raising the thresholds, we must also consider the effects of an increase in immigration on the demand for housing, childcare services, schools or francization services.
In this regard, Quebec has some homework to do, because it does not even spend all of the generous envelope that Ottawa gives it under the Canada-Quebec agreement on the sharing of powers in immigration.
In fact, the federal compensation amounts to 650 million dollars for 2020-2021, according to the explanatory notebook of the ministry of Immigration. But Quebec uses only 589 million “for the purposes of the integration and francization of immigrants”, specifies the annual management report of the Ministry.
If Quebec is really concerned about the capacity for integration, it should start by spending all the money that the federal government gives it. And spend it properly. Because the Auditor General has already described its francization programs as a failure.
Another good topic of discussion for the estates general on immigration…
Estates General would be an ideal forum to demystify all the complexity of immigration to the general public and provide a space for reflection in order to establish consensus within society.
But the CAQ has instead chosen to postpone until next year the public consultation on immigration that should have taken place this year.
Instead, it prefers to politicize the debate more by revealing at its congress, at the end of the week, the results of two studies, however, commissioned by the Ministry of Immigration from outside experts.
Please, let’s not start the debate upside down, with seductive electoral slogans and empty figures. If we want to find the right balance for immigration thresholds, let’s stop playing The Price Is Right.