This text is taken from Courrier de l’économie. Click here to subscribe.
Québec is increasingly taking the measure of the challenge posed by the aging of the population in terms of labor needs.
In its budget last week, the Legault government announced $615 million to deal with the labor shortage in the form of measures to support the integration of immigrants, worker training and investment and business innovation. He also relaxed the rules of the Pension Plan to encourage workers to delay their retirement and presented his tax cuts as a way to encourage Quebecers to work more.
Experts had been warning Quebec for years, if not decades, of the demographic shock that awaited it. This prediction was not risky, they said, since nothing was easier to predict than the combined effect of a baby boom in the post-war years, followed by a sharp fall in the rate of birth rate.
But these same experts also generally roll their eyes when they hear talk today of a “shortage” of labor in Quebec. For them, real labor shortages are rare, highly localized and short-lived. They arise when the total number of available workers falls short of the companies’ needs, regardless of the wages or working conditions they are willing to offer.
They generally affect a particular profession, in a given region and temporarily, and are embodied, among other things, by positions that remain vacant for a long time.
In the case of Quebec in general, our experts prefer the concept of “scarcity” of labour, which is associated with a broader and more diffuse phenomenon. It is characterized by an increased difficulty for employers to recruit and retain workers, whether because the number of the latter decreases with the aging of the population or because the economy is very vigorous. It may also be because the training or skills of the workers available do not correspond well to the needs of the companies, or because some of the workers who might be suitable — such as women, immigrants or older people — are not the work market.
Since 2021, Quebec has had, in total, more vacant positions than unemployed people. Although decreasing, this phenomenon was still true in the fourth and last quarter of last year, with around 183,000 unemployed for nearly 208,000 vacancies (including 90,000 for 120 days or more), reported last Thursday l Institute of Statistics of Quebec.
“Personally, I often use the two terms together, but not interchangeably, because they do not mean the same thing”, explained last week to the Duty a CSN economist on the scarcity and shortage of labour. In general, it is with a scarcity of labor that Quebec is grappling with, and it is intensifying, he said. However, the situation has become so difficult in many places that it is also fair to speak not of “the” labor shortage, but of “the” labor shortages that are afflicting a growing number of occupations and regions.
Emna Braham also prefers to speak of “scarcity of manpower” or “difficulties in recruiting” when it comes to the general situation in Quebec, she explained the same day. However, the director general of the Institut du Québec notes the growing popularity of the expression “labour shortage” in Quebec public discourse. Perhaps to express the fact that the problem is becoming more acute.
This trend is reflected in particular in the way the government has to talk about the phenomenon.
In fact completely absent until then, the expression “scarcity of manpower” really began to appear in the hundreds of pages of the Quebec government’s budget plans at the turn of the 2020s. In 2021, the number of mentions goes from 1 to 11, while there is still no question of “labour shortage”. The following year, the number of “scarcity” more than tripled (with 37 mentions), while a “labour shortage” was mentioned only three times. But the situation was completely reversed in the budget presented by Eric Girard last week, the “scarcity of labour” having been erased from the map in favor of the “shortage of labour”, which appears 58 times.
Well, many demographers must sigh, it took them a long time!