Quebec Premier Francois Legault has spurned industry pleas to allow more immigrant workers.
Instead he boasted that Quebec’s unemployment rate stood at 5.6 per cent in October, compared with seven per cent in Ontario and 6.7 per cent nationally.
At 3.8 per cent, the unemployment rate in Quebec City was the lowest of any census metropolitan area in the country.
“You have to admit it’s good news for [Quebec’s] 4.5 million workers because it puts upward pressure – and we’ve seen it for the past three years – on salaries,” he said. “I’d rather have a lack of workers than a lack of jobs,” Legault said.
However, Quebec businesses said there are 220,000 job vacancies and that’s the biggest obstacle to economic growth.
Food manufacturers and farmers have been constantly complaining about a lack of workers not only in Quebec, but also in almost every community across Canada.
The province’s manufacturers claim they have foregone $18-billion in revenues in the past two years because they could not find enough workers to fill orders.
Last week, five of Quebec’s main business groups joined with the Union des municipalités du Québec to demand Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government boost immigration levels to prevent the current labour shortage from getting even worse.
Legault, who was elected in 2018 on a signature promise to temporarily cut immigration levels, continues to push back against such demands.
The premier emphasized automation, job training and digitization last week while outlining his government’s strategy for easing the labour shortage and boosting productivity.
Legault has made closing the wealth gap between his province and Ontario – Quebec’s per-capita gross domestic product remains about 13 per cent lower – his government’s top economic priority. As a result, he has insisted that bringing in more immigrants, who typically start off making less than the average full-time salary of $56,000, would only make this task harder.
“Immigration might be part of the solution, but we have to realize that, at 50,000 [immigrants] a year, we have reached our capacity for integration,” Legault said. “If we want the next generations to continue speaking French, there is a limit to the number of immigrants we can accept.”
Legault is up for re-election next year.
