The Decibel - Parties promise to limit immigration in Quebec election

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

Quebec is the one province where immigration is a ballot-box issue in provincial elections. In 2018, it was one of the deciding factors that gave François Legault of the Coalition Avenir Québec his win.Now, the major parties are vowing to set different limits on how many permanent residents the province can let in without compromising its French identity. Meanwhile, its labour force is in decline and businesses are calling on provincial leaders to bring in more immigrants to help fill open jobs. Globe and Mail columnist Konrad Yakabuski unpacks the immigration debate in Quebec.

Hi, I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel, from The Globe and Mail. Quebec's provincial election is Monday, and a big election issue has been the limits on immigrants coming into the province. For years now, Quebec has capped the number of immigrants who get permanent residency. That number has been around 50,000 under Premier François Legault, who's running for re-election. He's the leader of the CAQ party, Coalition Avenir Québec. The other parties either want to lower that 50,000 number, like the Conservatives and the Parti Québécois, or they want to raise it, like the Liberals and Québec Solidaire. It may seem like splitting hairs to people outside of the province, but to some, getting this wrong could cost Québec a lot of money. And for others,

this is really important when it comes to preserving the province's French identity. If Quebec could go without immigration, I mean, François will go, we'd be all for it. Conrad Jakubuski is a columnist for the Globe and Mail based in Montreal. And today, we're going to talk about tensions around the immigration debate in Quebec. This is The Decibel. Conrad, thank you so much for speaking with me today. My pleasure. To start, can you just really help me understand,

why is it that each major party in the Quebec election is proposing a cap on immigration into the province. There's a lot of political mileage in the immigration question. So every party sets a limit on what it believes is the highest number of immigrants that Quebec can accept without losing its French identity. And they are inevitably numbers that are lower than would be required to keep Quebec's share of the population within Canada at a stable level. Okay, so this is about protecting French identity then. How is successful integration measured? It's a difficult thing to measure in a lot of ways because pure census numbers that show that a smaller proportion of people are speaking French at home

does not necessarily mean that new immigrants are not integrating into Francophone culture. And in the most recent census, 2021, the numbers showed probably the biggest percentage point drop yet in the number of people speaking French at home. Is it really about diluting the French identity? Because I think we should just talk about the comments that CAQ leader François Legault made earlier in this campaign when he said, quote, Quebecers are peaceful. They don't like bickering. They don't like extremists. They don't like violence.

We have to ensure that we keep it the way it is right now, end quote. Of course, he did walk that statement back, I should say, and then said that immigrants contribute to the province's wealth. But how much is this immigration cap really about preserving the French language? I mean, it is mostly about politics. This is about mobilizing voters. I mean, raising the fear that French is under threat and will continue to be under threat if Quebec sets too many immigrants is politically profitable. And so you have to chalk the premier's comments up to exclusively that. You're in the middle of an election campaign.

You want to mobilize a certain group of voters behind you that will get to the polls at a time when people don't necessarily vote in as large numbers as they used to. So when he made the comment about Quebecers being peaceful, it was in the context of there had been a series of shootings in largely minority neighborhoods in Montreal. That was his answer to that question, to concern about gun violence. And it was, whether you call it dog whistle or not, people knew what he was talking about. That, I mean, would we have this level of gun violence if we didn't have the same level of immigration? So, you know, he did walk back the comments, but he has said things since then that were consistent with those comments.

Again, this morning, he said that it would be a bit suicidal for Quebec to raise its immigration levels above the 50,000 level. So why would it be a bit suicidal? Well, again, this this dilution of, you know, in the past, he has evoked the idea of the Louisianization of Quebec, if, you know, has too many immigrants that the French language would be even more be reduced to kind of like a folklore status. Francois Legault continually presents immigration as, if not an outright threat, certainly sort of a necessary evil. Let's put it that way. If Quebec could go without immigration, I mean, Francois Legault would be all for it. But even he recognizes Quebec needs a certain level of immigration to fill jobs.

Okay, so let's talk about jobs then. This is an issue in Quebec because it has the lowest unemployment levels in Canada right now at 4.5%. They need people to fill jobs in Quebec. So with these caps in place, is it enough for the economic challenges that lay ahead for the province? Well, if you talk to almost any business person in the province, they would say no, obviously. And so that's the tension in this debate in Quebec. Quebec, as I said, has historically accepted fewer immigrants than the rest of Canada. And it has a birth rate that is certainly not superior to that in the rest

of Canada and many years has been below the level in the rest of Canada. So its population is aging more rapidly than the overall in the rest of Canada, outside Atlantic Canada. And its working age population is actually shrinking, which is not the case in provinces like Ontario, BC Atlantic Canada. And its working age population is actually shrinking, which is not the case in provinces like Ontario, BC or Alberta. So yes, it desperately needs workers to fill jobs. So that's the natural tension of the debate. The Chamber of Commerce, the Business Council would like to see at least 100,000 immigrants coming into the province. So that is above all of the caps that any of these parties are setting. Absolutely, absolutely.

And that's a minimum number for them. So Quebec has the second highest rate of job vacancies in the country after BC. And in many regions of the province where there's very little immigration, if any, you know, it's a real barrier to economic growth. Communities are depopulating. Do we have a sense of how much money we're talking about here? Like how much is this labor shortage actually hurting the Quebec economy? has maintained that in the past couple of years, Quebec has foregone $18 billion worth of gross domestic product because there are simply not enough people to fill jobs that are open that would allow companies to fulfill more orders, more export orders and those kinds of things.

But it's a very hard thing to measure because it's an opportunity cost. People who oppose higher immigration levels would say that the cost of integrating new immigrants has to be taken into account as well. Population growth is part of the equation of economic growth, no matter where in the world you live. So that goes into the equation. And it's just always a negative number in Quebec. So no party running in the Quebec election is willing to raise immigration levels to keep the rate of immigration on par, essentially, with the rest of Canada. And I guess to be clear here, Conrad, we're talking about immigrants who would become permanent residents.

Right. What about people who are coming to the province to work who are not in that stream? Well, that's the other side of the coin here. Because Quebec keeps the level of permanent residents, it accepts lower than in the rest of Canada. It accepts a higher number of temporary residents. At last count, there were 177,000. And there are no language requirements for people who come in under those programs. So they don't speak French. Almost none of them speak French. Not to complicate the matter, but because Ottawa has increasingly used the stream of temporary workers to select permanent residents, that sort of forces Quebec to do the same because it's an

existing pool. And among those people, very few have French language skills. So there's a bit of an irony here then, Conrad, because the... No kidding. Yeah, it's the immigrants who we're talking about the caps for here. It ends up being that, yes, you have all these requirements potentially for language skills, all these other things that you're looking at. But then if Quebec is supplementing their workforce with temporary foreign workers, that doesn't quite, there seems to be a little bit of a gap there. Well, there's a disconnect. And again, that speaks to the other side of this

debate who people who argue you need to raise the levels because, first of all, it's just out of fairness to many of these people who come as temporary foreign workers. Sometimes their desire is to enter the permanent residency stream. And just you get a better buy-in from someone who comes here as a permanent residence, perhaps than a temporary worker who doesn't feel the same need to, for instance, learn French or integrate. Conrad, if there aren't enough people to fill all the vacant jobs in the province, isn't capping in immigration, in the long term at least, isn't that addresses that question by saying there are lots of small countries in the world, such as Switzerland and Scandinavian countries, that don't necessarily grow population-wise, but have a very high quality of life. I mean, that debate is a bit outdated because many Scandinavian countries, and Sweden in particular, have increased immigration a lot in the past decade. But the other side of this is that Premier Legault says,

well, this is just sort of a price Quebec has to pay to remain Quebec. We'll be back in a minute. How is it, Conrad, that Quebec is the only province in Canada that gets to decide its own level of immigration? Well, this goes back to history. It has always been a demand

from Quebec and that in the after the first election of the Parti Québécois in 1976, the Sovereigntist government, the federal government then under Pierre Trudeau moved to address some of Quebec's concerns within Canada and immigration was one of them. Other provinces could ask for this power and would have to negotiate it with Ottawa, but none except Manitoba, to a certain degree, has even asked for some jurisdiction over choosing immigrants. But all the provinces are consulted on their needs

with respect to immigration and et cetera, on a more informal basis. To put this into context, how many immigrants actually come to the rest of Canada? Well, that's just it. I mean, the Trudeau government, when it came to power, immigration was about 300,000 a year, in between 300,000 and 350 for all of Canada. So that included Quebec's 50 to 60,000. The Trudeau government, though, has increased that dramatically. And its targets for the next three years are 430 immigrants this year, going up to 450,000 immigrants by 2024-25. So in the context of Quebec taking only 50,000, you can see that Quebec, at that rate, Quebec's level of immigration with respect to the rest of Canada would fall well below

its share of the Canadian population, you know, to barely 10%, you know, even to barely 10%, 10 or 11% of total immigrants, whereas Quebec represents 21 to 23% of the Canadian population. So it seems like the idea of integration is really front and center here. And of course, we cannot talk about this idea of integration without at least touching on Bill 21, which is a bill that bans public workers in positions of power from wearing religious symbols. This legislation has received some backlash from people as well. But can you help us connect the dots here, Conrad? Like, how is this idea of integration related to linguistic integration? Okay, so Quebec was historically a very religious province, let's put it that way.

One of the reasons Quebecers were kept docile, many Quebec nationalists believe, was because of the church. And so there is a strong stream of secularism that runs, a strong current of secularism that runs through Quebec politics since the 1960s. That's the origin of Bill 21, but it doesn't explain why the government chose to impose it. Because we know who this ends up targeting, right? This ends up targeting women who wear a hijab or someone who or a man who wears a kippah. Like there's certain very visual things that end up being the target of something like this. Absolutely. And some teachers wear hijabs, but it's certainly there had never been any incident of it being a problem.

So why was the Quebec actually addressing a problem? Well, it would say that, you know, a large number of Quebecers have concerns about this issue. And if we don't address it, it's only going to become a bigger problem in people's minds. And so that this sort of reassures Quebecers that there is a line to be drawn bill 21 will be for before the courts for years it will inevitably go but before the supreme court

of canada and uh so it's not going away the issue is not going away but it's not an issue in this election campaign no one is talking about bill 21 and that's largely because no party sees much value at this point in debating one or the other side of this issue. So even with the progressive parties in Quebec, Bill 21 is not an issue then? I think it was an issue when it was first passed, when the opportunity was there to influence the beta, there was a lot of debate about whether it should have been extended to teachers. And there was a lot of opposition to extending to teachers. Ultimately, the CAC went ahead with it. Wow. All right. So, Conrad, this election is on Monday. What will you be looking out for in the results when they come in? Well, I want to see what level of popular support the CAC actually maintains, because we'll

determine who turns out to vote. The CAC has lost, no doubt, support during this campaign, and that's largely a function of a really kind of mediocre campaign by Francois Legault, who has been in a bad mood for much of the campaign and under siege. I will be looking to see who forms the official opposition. The Liberal Party, which is decimated in francophone Quebec, if it forms the official opposition solely on the basis of its seats in anglophone and multicultural Quebec, that will create a certain number of tensions. It will increase the polarization, I think, of politics in Quebec. And whether the Conservative Party, which has gone from zero to almost 20 percentage points in the polls, actually is able to win a seat. I think if they fail to win a seat, that will only fuel

more of this sort of anti-government, anti-elite, anti-institution discourse, because they'll feel the political process is excluding them. So lots to look out for. Conrad, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. Thank you. My pleasure. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Welms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show.

Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer. And Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.