Piece by Michel Leblanc, President and CEO, Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, published in La Presse and La Presse+.
June 23, 2015
We are all immigrants
We need to increase the number of workers from immigration
to 60,000 people per year
The sharp decline in Quebec’s working age population is cause for concern. It is undoubtedly the reason for Premier Philippe Couillard recently coming out in favour of increasing the number of immigrants.
According to projections from the Institut de la statistique du Québec, the size of the working age population will decline dramatically between 2017 and 2030, even with the current volume of 50,000 immigrants admitted every year. We will have increasing difficulty replacing people taking retirement and meeting our labour needs, even if we step up our efforts to train young people.
We need to find fast, effective solutions to reassure companies that there will be a large enough pool of skilled workers to support them in their growth. Because let’s face it, many jurisdictions with an active population that is aging less rapidly than ours and with a higher graduation rate among young people than Quebec’s are also implementing strategies to attract skilled, specialized immigrants. If we don’t act, other jurisdictions will receive the new investments to modernize and develop new production capacity.
We need to act on a number of fronts. It is essential to fight early school leaving, improve the CEGEP and university graduation rate and ensure we train for the jobs we have. However, this will not prevent the relative decline in the working age population and the demographic weight of Quebec within Canada. This is why we need to increase the number of workers from immigration to 60,000 people annually.
Immigration based on the effective selection of candidates immediately increases the working age population. Not only that, immigration also helps strengthen our society’s internationalization, increases companies’ ability to innovate and intensifies our creativity.
Obviously we can’t neglect the challenge of integrating immigrants to the workforce, which is the basis of their integration to society. The fact that the unemployment rate among immigrants is almost twice as high as for Canadians by birth shows that serious effort is required to improve the selection and professional integration of immigrants. This does not mean that the government should maintain current levels of immigration.
Unfortunately, the debate about immigration is in danger of being needlessly polarized, as if we had to choose between successfully integrating immigrants to the workforce and increasing the number of new immigrants. Such a polarization assumes that Quebec cannot act on both fronts at once. We have to move beyond this sterile debate and approach immigration as a whole. Let’s be ambitious; let’s understand our strengths and ensure that we adopt ways to ensure the prosperity of Quebec and Montréal. Let’s increase the number of immigrants, while improving their selection and professional integration. It’s the key to our success and prosperity.
We should not forget that we are the children of immigrants. It is part of our identity, and it is a major source of wealth creation.