Thank you for your question.
I'll speak to the situation in the National Capital Region. We are currently experiencing a fairly significant, if not very significant, labour shortage. An unemployment rate of 3.8% is excessively low. The problem isn't creating jobs, but filling available positions.
Working together is necessary to ensure that there are more incentives to distribute immigrants who come to settle in Quebec more equitably. As I said earlier, the population of the National Capital Region represents about 10% of Quebec's population. In 2017, 6.7% to 7% of these same immigrants settled in our territory.
I think incentives should be put in place, if only to respect the demographic representativeness of the different regions, to facilitate the retention of these immigrants and to optimize the attractiveness of our region. In recent weeks, community leaders here have advocated francophone immigration.
What particularities could we look into? Are there any collaborative or modulating initiatives that could be put in place? From a perspective of collaboration between the different levels of government, we believe that this would be strongly considered.
In answer to your question, I would say that immigration to the National Capital Region could greatly assist in addressing competitiveness issues.
As mentioned earlier, it may be appropriate to consider measures to allow seniors who wish to remain in the labour market to do so, without being penalized for tax purposes. Such measures would be very interesting. I just want to say that people aged 60 today, in 2018, do not necessarily look like people who were 60 in 1950. Unfortunately, we may be depriving ourselves of extraordinary talents and skills that would be beneficial to our companies.
Immigration is good, but other alternatives could be considered.