Thank you very much.
Hello, everyone.
Madam Chair, members of Parliament, thank you for the opportunity to discuss with you the labour market impact assessments that employers must conduct when hiring temporary foreign workers.
This topic is of great interest to the Fédération des chambres de commerce du Québec, but also to the 50,000 businesses we represent across Quebec.
Please allow me to provide a brief and necessary reminder of Quebec's unique approach to immigration. As you know, selection for permanent immigration falls under Quebec's jurisdiction. Quebec employers therefore have to deal with the duplication of numerous policies and administrative constraints. This situation is denounced by immigrants themselves, as the newspapers have recently reported. It is also denounced by employers, community organizations and immigration specialists. The delays associated with permanent immigration processes are extremely long in Quebec. It takes more than 27 months for an immigrant wishing to settle in Quebec to obtain permanent residence, while it takes six months for an immigrant wishing to settle elsewhere in Canada. This makes no sense.
These delays cause headaches for all Quebec stakeholders. A large majority of immigrants therefore turn to temporary immigration programs, such as the one we are discussing today, in order to settle quickly in Quebec and then benefit from the gateways that are the Certificat de sélection du Québec, or CSQ, and the Programme de l'expérience québécoise, or PEQ. With the exception of temporary foreign workers in the agricultural sector, the temporary foreign worker program, or TFWP, is used by immigrants and employers with an eye to permanent immigration. This should be kept in mind in today's discussions.
Quebec employers must have their labour market impact assessments approved by both the provincial and federal governments before hiring a temporary foreign worker. Changes to the program in 2014 have caused a great deal of anxiety for Quebec employers. In addition, at the time these restrictions were imposed, Quebec's working age population was declining, there was a prolonged period of full employment and there were a historic number of job vacancies. It is clear that the TFWP has not kept pace with the labour needs of employers in Quebec and that major relaxations are required. Even though we are in a pandemic period, Quebec has more than 148,000 vacant positions, while only 8,800 temporary workers could be hired in 2020, again outside the agricultural sector.
Today, we want to make five recommendations. I will present them to you quickly.
Recent changes to the Programme de l'expérience québécoise, which paves the way for an application for permanent residence, require immigrants to obtain two years of work experience. This involves systematic renewal of work permits and labour market impact studies. Our first recommendation is that work permit extensions be made upon request, without additional paperwork and without the need for a new study.
In addition, employers using the TFWP are almost always the same. The vast majority have long demonstrated that they favour the local workforce and treat immigrant labour appropriately. Our second recommendation is that a trusted employer program be implemented that would allow regular and exemplary users to be exempt from the requirement to conduct labour market impact assessments.
In addition, the list of occupations eligible for streamlined processing, which is determined by the Quebec government, has grown rapidly recently. It has grown from 37 recognized occupations in 2015 to 221 in 2020. However, we note that these changes are not commensurate with the needs in Quebec. It is therefore essential to expand this list to include semi-skilled and low-skilled occupations for which there is a high demand. This is our third recommendation. These jobs are predominantly in manufacturing or services, and are largely represented among the 148,000 vacancies in Quebec that I mentioned earlier.
It should also be noted that the process in connection with the labour market impact assessment comes with other obligations, including the obligation to submit a transition plan. This requirement may seem legitimate when you look at the initial spirit of the program, but the real transition plan for Quebec employers is to be able to count on these workers in the long term. This requirement seems to us to be superfluous, and it must be reviewed. This is our fourth recommendation.
Finally, we believe that the maximum percentage of temporary foreign workers within a company should be increased to 20% for all employers, as it was in 2015 and 2016. This is our fifth and final recommendation. The problems caused by the 10% limit are widely known. You've heard about them before. The 10% cap imposes undue constraints on employers and limits the growth of many SMEs in Quebec.
As parliamentarians, you have a lot on your plate. However, if we keep in mind the objective of aligning the needs of our businesses and our desire to be a welcoming place, I am convinced that we can make the necessary changes.
I would be pleased to answer your questions.
Thank you.