Public consultations on immigration planning begin Tuesday in Quebec. The duty offers some keys to understanding to set the table for discussions. Today, a demographer insists on the importance in these debates of the… demographic argument.
It would take much more than 60,000 immigrants to Quebec each year to slow down the decline in demographic weight within Canada, demographer Marc Termote immediately emphasizes. However, he “fairly agrees” with the increase in thresholds, one of the two scenarios proposed by the government of François Legault, since it would at least make it possible to maintain the population of La Belle Province.
One of the options of the current exercise indeed proposes to increase the thresholds of at least 10,000 permanent immigrants by 2027.
The associate professor of demography at the University of Montreal himself suggested last year to move little by little to a target of 58,000 immigrants in Quebec, in a report commissioned by the Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration (MIFI).
Its reasoning for arriving at this figure, however, differed from that of the government, which justifies it in particular by the possibility of an “increased contribution to labor needs in certain priority sectors of activity”, in its preparatory notebook for the consultations.
It is rather a question of demographic maintenance: “We depend 100% on immigration just to keep the number of inhabitants in Quebec constant in the long term,” he explains. As elsewhere in industrialized countries, the province is on track to experience a natural increase close to zero, while births will soon no longer compensate for deaths. To maintain even “Quebec’s current low demographic growth,” it would be necessary to reach at least 58,000 immigrants, says Mr. Termote.
A threshold of 58,000 – or 60,000, like what the government is proposing – would exceed the maximum recorded over the last fifty years, he notes.
The annual target of 50,000 immigrants represents approximately the quantity of permanent residences permitted by Quebec each year since 2009. During the same period, the population of Quebec grew by 13%. It is therefore the “immigration rate” which has decreased, that is to say the proportion of new arrivals in relation to the total population.
“The immigration rate is one way of reasoning, but we must consider other factors,” says the demographer, such as whether or not a state wants to increase its population. Quebec has, for example, had much higher immigration rates during major humanitarian crises, such as in 1957 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary or at the turn of the 1980s with the arrival of Vietnamese refugees.
No cure for relative decline
As for the demographic weight of the province in the country, Mr. Termote’s verdict is clear: “We are condemned to be marginalized within Canada. »
Even if the number of permanent residents has varied between 14,000 and 55,000 per year since 1951, one constant remains: Quebec has always received a proportion of immigrants smaller than its demographic weight in Canada. A phenomenon which underlies the erosion of demographic weight in the Federation.
In 1951, for example, a year of significant immigration, Quebec welcomed 24% of all immigrants to Canada, but the province’s population represented 29% of that of the country.
This gap has also been particularly large recently. In 2019, the first year that the Coalition Avenir Québec rolled out its immigration program, the province received 12% of all immigration from Canada with 40,000 permanent residents. Quebec represented nearly 23% of the total population. Even a threshold of 60,000 immigrants will still represent only about 12% of the expected Canadian total of 485,000 in 2024.
Is Canada moving too fast? Or Quebec which is moving too slowly? “This is a long-term trend that is not about to stop,” the professor tactfully responds to this increasingly polarizing question. By extrapolating, “even if it is a dangerous exercise”, at the end of the century, the weight of Quebec will only be 15% within Canada, he calculated.
None of the ways to remedy the decline in Quebec’s demographic weight seems possible to him. Fertility would have to be raised to levels higher than those of the last fifty years, which is “ethically unjustified for women”, he believes. Or even, receiving more than 100,000 immigrants, which seems “unrealistic” to him and in “complete break with the objectives of language policy pursued for decades”, he wrote in 2022.