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By Julie Gordon and Allison Lampert
OTTAWA/MONTREAL (Reuters) – Hérouxville, a small town in Canadian Quebec, made headlines 15 years ago when it published a code of conduct for potential immigrants, warning them not to stone women or burn them alive, and to only use canopy. their faces on Halloween.
Fast until 2022, and actively attracts newcomers.
The city council’s one-time concern to welcome immigrants at the expense of its French-speaking Quebec identity has given way to a more urgent concern: the need for more families to help fill jobs, attend their schools and their population.
Hérouxville now needs to be known for its inclusion. It is contemplating measures such as subsidized housing to attract more immigrants.
“A new family, no matter where they come from, if we can welcome them here, we are happy to do so,” said Bernard Thompson, mayor of the city of 1,300 other people in central Quebec. “Desires are massive in rural areas. “
Hérouxville’s success is a reaction to a larger one facing Quebec, Canada and many other countries, to varying degrees, as governments from London and Washington to Canberra and Tokyo balance public and political pressures to curb immigration against crippling labor shortages.
An aging population, an increase in the number of retiring staff, and commercial and COVID-related chaos are among the points contributing to staff shortages in professional and low-paying occupations, from hospitality and production to transportation and agriculture.
Canada has the worst labour shortage in the Western world, according to the latest OECD data since late 2021. Their plight has been exacerbated by a record wave of retirements this year. The challenge is acute in rural Quebec, which overlooks a limited group of newcomers who prefer to remain in Montreal.
The latest data from the Canadian census provides new figures on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s push to increase immigration to tackle worker and skills gaps, which economists say are driving up wages and threatening to lower productivity.
Immigrants now make up 23 per cent of Canada’s population, up from 21. 9 per cent in 2016, and newcomers account for 80 per cent of the country’s labour force expansion in recent years, according to the census released Wednesday through Statistics Canada.
The census also paints a picture of urban landings, with more than 90% of recent immigrants living in a city, leaving small towns and rural spaces suffering to attract newcomers to upgrade factory workers, supermarket employees and aging doctors.
CAP D’IMMIGRANT DU QUÉBEC
Quebec, a predominantly French-speaking province with a broad immigration policy, is reluctant to replace more than anywhere else in Canada. Only 14. 6% of its 8. 3 million people were born abroad, well below the national average, according to the new data.
The Avenir Québec Coalition government was re-elected this month with a commitment to restrict steady arrivals to 50,000 per year to safeguard the region’s language and culture. consistent with the penny since Trudeau’s Liberals took effect in late 2015.
Reflecting the torn local sentiment, Quebec Premier Francois Legault described immigrants as a source of wealth, but also said allowing more people to enter without making sure they speak French would be “suicidal. “
But Legault passed an olive branch to immigrants last week, in a closet that included a trilingual immigration minister and a black anti-racism minister.
The Quebec Immigration Department did not respond to an inquiry about arrival limits and challenging situations for this article.
The economic is biting.
Quebec had 246,300 vacant positions in July 2022 and only 185,100 unemployed. Labor shortages are especially acute in the productive sector, where the region’s industrial organization estimates the shortage has cost them C$18 billion ($13 billion) in two years.
“Our labor market participation is under more pressure than elsewhere, because we just don’t see foreign staff replacing those who retire,” said Jimmy Jean, lead economist at Desjardins Group in Montreal.
Jean said he hopes the Quebec government will come under pressure from businesses to increase the immigration cap, adding that the province risks staying economically through neighboring Ontario and other major provinces, Alberta and British Columbia.
CODE ‘A HISTORICAL DOCUMENT’
It’s Quebec’s rural towns that suffer the most, as they have less strength to attract immigrants than Montreal, the province’s largest city, which itself faces a severe labor shortage.
That’s why locals are rolling out the red carpet for newcomers in places like Hérouxville, which has long since abandoned its code of conduct for immigrants.
Mayor Thompson said the code, unanimously approved by the city council in 2007, was recorded in the town’s archives in 2010 through the council he has led since 2009.
“It was never a legal documentArray. . . And now it’s an old document,” he added. “It’s been a long time since the citizens and my city sidelined this episode. “
In fact, the surrounding region of Mauricie has begun to attract immigrants. Villages have formed committees for new arrivals to locate everything from housing to halal food.
In nearby Shawinigan, home to 50,000 people, immigrants are encouraged to take trips to logging villages, see activities like curling and send their children to summer camps to revel in Canadian wilderness. Another crusade put immigrant faces on buses.
In the city of Saint-Tite, Walid Gasmi works at metallurgical company Acier Rayco after moving to Canada with his wife just before the pandemic. While many of his Algerian friends prefer the bustling city of Montreal, Gasmi loves the opportunities he has discovered in Saint-Tite, a city known for its annual Western festival.
“Here they give other people an opportunity: they exercise them, they invest in human resources,” he said.
Rayco Steel President Eric St-Laurent said he has enough paintings to rent to six more people and would gladly settle for professional immigrants to fill vacancies, even if they didn’t initially speak French. “It’s not a major challenge for us. “
Quebec turned out to have been lucky to sell La Francophonie with its immigration ceilings. The new census data showed that 28. 7% of recent immigrants in the province spoke French as their mother tongue, up from 25. 7% in 2016.
But most newcomers to the province still cite a foreign language as their mother tongue.
Éva-Marie Nagy-Cloutier, human resources coordinator at snowblower maker Les Machineries Pronovost in Saint-Tite, is also flexible with language, but said newcomers want support.
When corporate workers had to self-isolate after arriving from Tunisia for COVID-19, city citizens piled up to help with supplies, he said.
A TEMPORARY SOLUTION
With the buildup of factory jobs, Quebec brands argue that the province will have to stick to the example of other provinces and increase its number of qualified permanent residents.
Since new permanent immigration has necessarily remained robust since 2015, the province has relied on transient foreign staff to fill its vacancies, with an expansion of 163. 9% over the same period.
Many employers now rely on this transient workforce. Symptoms of “Help Wanted” are rampant in retail outlets and restaurants in cities and towns in the Outaouais region of western Quebec.
Manuela Teixeira, who moved from Portugal to Canada as a child and now runs six businesses at the Old Chelsea city hotel, said she hired 11 transient employees in Morocco months ago, but is still waiting for documents for 8 of them.
It’s hard to fill service positions, especially after COVID shutdowns have led many employees to move to other industries, and it’s not paints that can be automated, he said.
“The French language will have to be because it is part of the wealth of the country,” he added. “But I don’t think we deserve to be afraid of other people who come from abroad. “
(Reporting through Julie Gordon in Ottawa and Allison Lampert in Montreal; Editing via Pravin Char)