Quebec demands that Ottawa should review its rules for temporary foreign workers

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The quebec minister of Immigration, David Heurtel.

VAT New

Thursday, 1 march 2018 16:50

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Thursday, 1 march 2018 16:50

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QUEBEC – The quebec minister of Immigration, David Heurtel, sum Ottawa to quickly change the rules for the admission of temporary foreign workers.

The minister is categorical : quebec firms lose existing contracts for lack of manpower because of these rules.

“Ottawa has a programme of temporary migration which is not at all suited to the realities experienced by our companies here in Quebec”, launched by the minister Heurtel, in an interview with TVA News.

“We, he continued, the unemployment rate in 2016 to evaluate the applications of enterprises. It requires impact studies and we can not fill more than 10 % of the available jobs with temporary migration.”

A case in point : Optel, a Quebec-based company that manufactures systems of traceability everywhere in the world, has need of labor, particularly programmers.

“When one is not able to recruit here, it is simply a hiring in our other sites abroad”, points out François Boivin, executive vice president of the company.

Optel has factories in Ireland, Brazil and India. Within three years, it wants to double its turnover.

“In Quebec,” said François Boivin, that will depend on the availability of labour, because already, at the present time, it is a problem of finding the employees we need. It was more than a quarantine of positions to fill at this time.”

Strict rules

The strict rules of the city of Ottawa in the field of temporary migration have forced the company in 2014 to make the production that could have been done in Quebec. “We realized that here in Quebec, it was not in a position to hire,” says Mr. Boivin.

Optel is not the only company in Quebec to be confronted with these obstacles. The banners reading “We are hiring” appear everywhere in the province.

Rotobec en Beauce and Supermetal in the eastern Townships living with the same situation in Optel.

“By 2024, we will have 1.4 million jobs to fill in Quebec, in all sectors, in all areas, all types of training,” said minister Heurtel.

“You can’t have an economic immigration program in Canada that is “coast to coast”, he says.

“We need to allow our companies to continue their development and currently it slows down their development,” adds Mr. Heurtel.

He has written to the federal government in this subject, and it is currently waiting for a response.

On average, it takes eight months before getting permission to hire a temporary worker overseas. Given the demographics in Quebec, the minister Heurtel is estimated that 20 % of positions to be filled by 2024 will be attributed to immigrants.