Quebec will require some temporary foreign workers to pass a French language test in order to renew their work permits.
Premier François Legault, flanked by Immigration Minister Christine Fréchette and French Language Minister Jean-François Roberge, announced the measure at a press conference in Quebec City on Wednesday as he unveiled the government’s updated immigration plan.
“The message will be very clear, both for students and for workers,” Legault said. “In the future, if you want to come to Quebec for more than three years, if you want to be accepted as a permanent immigrant, you must speak French.”
The immigration plan, which includes lower-than-expected targets for new immigrants to Quebec, and the new rules requiring temporary foreign workers to pass a French test, are part of the government’s plan to stop what Legault and his ministers describe as the decline of French in Quebec.
“Across the board, the indicators are red,” Roberge said of language data in Quebec.
“French at work, French at home, consumption of culture and media in French, all of this is in decline.”
Legault’s CAQ government had previously planned to increase the number of permanent immigrants to 60,000. But in the updated plan presented on Wednesday, it set its target at 50,000 for 2024 and 2025.
Normally, the government sets projections beyond two years, but this time, Legault said, it wanted to study the data after accepting 50,000 immigrants a year and see the impact on the French language before deciding whether to set new targets.
The 50,000 figure does not include the 6,500 students who can immigrate to Quebec under the Programme de l’expérience québécoise (PEQ), which allows them to stay in Quebec after graduating from a French-language university.
The French language test that temporary foreign workers in Quebec under the PTET programme will now have to pass if they want to renew their permit after three years will verify that workers can converse in French at a basic level. There will be no written component.
It will ensure that they can “discuss with those around them, exchange information on familiar topics, such as basic needs, everyday life,” Frechette said. “It’s important that people who spend several years here – even with a temporary status – can speak and understand French.”
Agricultural workers will be exempt from the test.
Employers will be required to provide time on the job for workers to learn French, Frechette said. But the details of this requirement are still being worked out, she said.
Parti Québecois MNA Pascal Berubé, whose pro-sovereignty party has begun to gain ground on the ruling CAQ in the polls, criticised the immigration plan as too broad.
The CAQ is still welcoming too many immigrants, he said, echoing a 2018 Legault election promise to cap immigration at 40,000 people a year.
He also ridiculed the language test requirement. Temporary foreign workers will be able to pass the test if they can order a coffee or a beer in French, Berubé said.
“If you can say that, ‘three more years’,” he said.
The opposition’s immigration critic, Liberal MNA Monsef Derraji, said the government should improve the tools the province has to improve French instead of cracking down on immigrants who are too slow to learn the language.
“The weight of French in Quebec can’t be put on the shoulders of immigrants,” he said.
François Vincent, vice-president of the Quebec branch of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, said the government’s immigration target is too low to address the province’s labour shortage.
The language test requirement will also create more bureaucracy for small businesses, he said. He hoped the government would extend exemptions from the test to other sectors, not just agriculture. Many temporary foreign workers work in the hospitality industry, for example.
“It’s a bad decision that will hurt small businesses that have these temporary foreign workers,” he said.
