Quebec puts the brakes on low-wage temporary workers in Montreal

Photo: Graham Hughes The Canadian Press Quebec Premier François Legault to make announcement at 10 a.m.

Sarah R. Champagne

Published at 6:48 a.m. Updated at 10:30 a.m.

• Québec

Quebec decrees a six-month moratorium on the low-wage temporary foreign worker program in the Montreal region. Prime Minister François Legault will make the announcement Tuesday morning with Immigration Minister Christine Fréchette, but certain information has already been confirmed Monday evening.

The hiring freeze for this workforce will be decreed only for this region from the beginning of September. Applications will not be considered for six months, but those already approved could continue their course.

Large sectors such as health, construction and food processing will also be exempt, report other media. Agricultural workers are also not included, since they are in another part of the program.

Increase

Even if historically temporary workers were mainly intended for agriculture, the other parts of this program have become more important in recent years.

At the end of 2023, low-wage workers, that is, workers earning less than $27.47 per hour in Quebec, represented about a third of the program. In total and for the entire province, they would have been about 20,000 people, out of the nearly 59,000 whose work permits came into effect in 2023.

More recently approved applications, however, show that low-wage international recruitment continued to increase, forming up to 40% of Labour Market Impact Assessments (LMIAs) for the first quarter of 2024, according to our compilation. LMIAs are the first step for companies wishing to hire abroad and are used to show that there are no employees available locally for a position.

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Among the positions approved last year in Montreal or Laval and which are not in the exceptions, we find in particular nearly 500 cooks, 340 counter servers, 230 handlers, 200 landscaping workers, 175 maintenance workers, 165 administrative assistants and 150 heavy truck drivers.

The increase in recruitment for low-wage positions took off in 2022, as the economy recovered from the pandemic, but also after easing measures desired by Quebec. François Legault's government has notably raised the hiring ceiling per workplace.

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Dozens of jobs have also been added to the “simplified treatment”, including many low-wage positions. This simplified treatment means that employers are not obliged to post the job beforehand and therefore demonstrate that they have sought to recruit someone locally, which is increasingly displeasing to unions. 

Many of these temporary workers do not qualify for permanent residency because they work in jobs that do not require training. After removing an access route for these so-called unskilled people, the Legault government will reinstate a passage starting next November, provided they reach an intermediate level of French.

An increasingly pressing demand

Last June, Prime Minister François Legault asked Justin Trudeau to make more efforts to reduce the number of temporary workers by 50%.

After his meeting with his counterpart, he said he wanted to put more emphasis on another temporary work program, the International Mobility Program (IMP), which is under federal control.

Two weeks ago, the federal Minister of Employment, Randy Boissonnault, had said he was considering blocking the use of low-wage temporary foreign workers. A measure that he intended to apply to “certain regions” and “certain sectors of activity,” he declared in a press release, without specifying which ones.

This time, it was Quebec that asked Ottawa to stop processing LMIAs, according to information from other media.

More details will follow.

with François Carabin, in Quebec City