Peter Black
March 27, 2024
Local Journalism Initiative reporter
peterblack@qctonline.com
Maybe in the age of Donald Trump, saying outrageous things does not necessarily mean the end of a politician’s career.
Take the example of Jean Boulet, the Coalition Avenir Québec minister of immigration at the time, who proclaimed during a September 2022 election campaign debate: “80 per cent of immigrants go to Montreal, do not work, do not speak French or do not adhere to the values of Quebec society.”
Whether they poison the blood of true Quebecers, Boulet did not speculate.
The statement, of course, sparked the requisite amount of angry reaction, and Boulet offered up an apology of sorts for saying out loud what he was thinking.
Then-Liberal leader Dominique Anglade, the multilingual, super-high-achieving daughter of immigrants, called for Premier François Legault to fire his seemingly anti-immigrant minister of immigration.
Boulet was re-elected with an increased majority in his 92 per cent white and francophone Trois-Rivières riding, and Legault promptly named him labour minister in the new cabinet.
From his new vantage point as minister responsible for the Quebec workforce, Boulet surely would have intimate knowledge – and a different opinion – of the role immigrants play in the job market.
Though he didn’t have temporary foreign workers in mind when he unleashed his rant, Boulet is surely mindful of the importance they have in the seasonal Quebec economy.
For example, we are seeing the impact of the CAQ government’s freak-out about unwanted immigrants play out in different ways. Quebec begged Ottawa to reimpose visa requirements on Mexican travellers in the hopes of keeping out undesirable asylum seekers. Ottawa quickly obliged, and now, because of the short notice to process visas, the immigrant worker-dependent Quebec fish processing industry is paralyzed by a lack of workers for plants.
One operator in Gaspé has 12 workers approved of the 125 he wants to put to work. In Matane, a Danish-owned processing plant has closed completely for want of its Mexican workers, throwing some 50 locals out of a job as a consequence.
The trouble in the fishery business is just the first wave of the impact of the new Mexican visa requirement. With the planting season around the corner – believe it or not, with winter still stubbornly gripping the land – agricultural producers are about to hit the panic button.
About 4,500 Mexican workers have been hired to work in Quebec fields as of April, and less than half have had their applications processed to fly north in time. The Association des producteurs maraîchers du Québec, the Quebec market gardens association, is dreading a disaster where vegetable prices soar and producers face bankruptcy.
Such is the impact of a hasty political decision driven by the desire to prevent asylum seekers from flying to Canada, where many, if not most, once arrived here, promptly attempt to cross by land into the United States illegally.
The Mexican visa mess is a skirmish in the larger war with the federal government over absolute control over immigration into Quebec, a longstanding plank in the CAQ platform.
There were the requisite howls from the usual quarters when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau officially refused Legault’s request at a recent meeting in Montreal.
Trudeau could hardly surrender to Quebec what the Constitution currently forbids. Immigration is a shared power. Sharing that power is something the federal government has already done, courtesy of a 1991 deal that gives Quebec, alone among the provinces, full control of “economic immigrants,” notably those who bring expertise and investment to the province.
Trudeau, of course, has plenty of wiggle room to grant Quebec more input into the amount and type of non-economic immigrants, including asylum-seekers, students and people entering for the purposes of family reunification, the latter being particularly sensitive.
Still, in Legault’s and Parti Québécois Leader Paul Saint-Pierre Plamondon’s dreams, what would full control of immigration look like? One suspects whatever restrictive, francophone-favouring measures that might ensue would eventually rid Quebec of the problem of too many immigrants wanting to come to this place.
And with immigration being the sole bulwark against a declining and aging Quebec population, who is going to do all the work Boulet says immigrants don’t do?
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