Canadian town of Herouxville made national news 15 years ago, when it published a code of conduct for prospective immigrants, cautioning them not to burn women alive or stone them, and to only hide their faces for Halloween.
By the year 2022, it has begun actively wooing newcomers. The town council’s long-standing apprehension about accepting immigrants at the risk of maintaining its French-speaking Quebec heritage has given way to a more urgent concern: the requirement for more families to help fill jobs, send their children to its schools, and maintain its population.
Now, Herouxville aspires to be renowned for its diversity. It’s thinking about strategies to entice more immigrants, such as providing subsidised housing.
The mayor of this town of 1,300 inhabitants in central Quebec, Bernard Thompson, stated, “A new family, no matter where they are from, if we can welcome them here, we are pleased to do so.” The requirements in rural communities are enormous.
Herouxville’s outreach is a response to a larger conundrum that Quebec, Canada, and many other nations are confronting in varying degrees as governments from London and Washington to Canberra and Tokyo attempt to combine political and popular pressure to reduce immigration with dire labour shortages.
A staff shortage that affects both low-paid and skilled sectors, from hospitality and manufacturing to transport and agriculture, is a result of ageing populations, a rise in the number of people retiring, COVID travel, and corporate turmoil.
According to the most recent Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) data from late 2021, Canada has the biggest labour shortages among Western nations. An unprecedented flood of retirements this year has made its predicament worse. The issue is especially severe in rural Quebec, which is frequently disregarded by the small number of newcomers who choose to remain in Montreal.
New results from the most recent census in Canada support Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s efforts to increase immigration to fill staffing and skill gaps, which analysts say are driving up salaries and contributing to lower productivity.
According to Statistics Canada’s census, which was issued on Wednesday, immigrants now make up 23% of Canada’s population, up from 21.9% in 2016, and they have contributed 80% of the country’s labour force growth in the previous five years.
More than 90% of recent immigrants live in cities, according to the census, leaving smaller towns and rural communities struggling to draw in new residents to replace retiring industrial employees, grocery store clerks, and physicians.
More than any other province in Canada, Quebec, which has a large degree of autonomy over its own immigration policy, is fighting change. The new statistics revealed that just 14.6% of its 8.3 million residents were foreign-born, far less than the national average.
In order to protect the region’s language and culture, the Coalition Avenir Quebec government was re-elected last month on a promise to impose a 50,000-per-year limit on permanent immigration. While Canada’s population has increased 49% since Trudeau’s Liberals entered government in late 2015, immigration has been constant at or around that pace for years.
Francois Legault, the premier of Quebec, has had mixed feelings on immigrants, seeing them as a source of income while also claiming that permitting more people to immigrate without assuring that they understand French would be “suicidal”.
Only 185,100 individuals were jobless in Quebec as of July 2022, whereas there were 246,300 open positions. Manufacturing is one business where there is a severe labour shortage, with the industry organisation in the area claiming that in two years, personnel shortages cost them C$18 billion ($13 billion).
In addition, Jean warned that the province ran the risk of falling behind economically by neighbouring Ontario and other sizable provinces such as Alberta and British Columbia. He predicted that the Quebec government would face pressure from corporations to raise the immigration threshold.
Since Montreal, the largest city in the province, is a varied metropolis and therefore experiences severe labour shortages, it is rural villages in Quebec that are suffering the most.
Because of this, communities like Herouxville, which long ago gave up on its immigration code of conduct, are taking it upon themselves to extend the red carpet to newcomers.
The code, which the town council overwhelmingly adopted in 2007, was reportedly relegated to the municipal archives in 2010 by the council he has presided over since 2009.
In fact, the neighbouring Mauricie area has been courting immigrants. In order to assist immigrants in finding everything from homes to halal food, villages have established committees.
Immigrants are urged to visit lumberjack towns, practise sports like curling, and send their kids to summer camp so they may experience the Canadian wilderness in the adjacent city of Shawinigan, which has 50,000 residents. Buses with immigrant faces have appeared in another campaign.
With its immigration quotas, Quebec seems to have had some success encouraging French-speaking people. 28.7% of recent immigrants to the province, up from 25.7% in 2016, were found to speak French as their first language, according to the most available census statistics.
Manufacturers in Quebec claim that as industrial employment increases, the government should immigrate more skilled permanent residents, as other provinces have done.
The province has relied on temporary foreign workers to fill its openings because new permanent immigration has been practically flat since 2015, with those permits rising 163.9% during that time.
These temporary workers are becoming essential to many companies. Signs stating “Help sought” may be seen everywhere throughout the towns and villages in western Outaouais, Quebec, including shops and eateries.
In the resort town of Old Chelsea, Manuela Teixeira, who was born in Portugal but immigrated to Canada as a youngster and now owns six businesses, said she hired 11 temporary employees in Morocco months ago but is still awaiting papers for eight of them.
Service positions are difficult to replace and cannot be automated, she added, especially in light of the fact that many workers have moved to other sectors as a result of COVID lockdowns.
In the resort town of Old Chelsea, Manuela Teixeira, who was born in Portugal but immigrated to Canada as a youngster and now owns six businesses, said she hired 11 temporary employees in Morocco months ago but is still awaiting papers for eight of them.
Service occupations are difficult to fill since they cannot be automated, especially after COVID lockdowns caused many workers to relocate to other industries.
She said, “The French language needs to be protected because it’s part of the country’s richness. But I don’t think we should be afraid of people from abroad.
