Labour shortage dominates talk of the economy
Parties offer different visions to solve issue that’s a growing concern
The head of Quebec’s largest employers’ group can sum up the most important election issue for his members in a word: workers.
“We have a gap that is growing and growing between the number of workers that we need and the number of workers that are available,” said Yves-Thomas Dorval, the president and CEO of the Conseil du patronat du Québec.
For more than two straight years, Quebec’s unemployment rate has been below the Canadian average, except for a single month in 2017 when those two rates were equal.
Even in the regions where the unemployment rate is well above the Quebec average, there’s still talk about the need for workers.
“In the city, we have full employment,” Denis Côté, the mayor of Gaspé, said in early September. “In the summer we have more than full employment; there’s an enormous shortage of workers in the summer.”
Where politicians once campaigned on promises to create jobs, Quebec’s main political parties are now promising to help employers fill empty positions.
Underlying Quebec’s labour shortage is a strong economy and an aging population.
Jean- Guy Côté, the associate director of the Institut du Québec, a think-tank created through a partnership between the Conference Board of Canada and HEC Montréal, said he thinks Quebec’s aging population is a major challenge to the province’s economy because it touches on so many areas — the availability of workers, employment and overall economic growth.
“For the future economic growth of Quebec we need to think about how we’re going to be able to fill these jobs. Is it education? Is it immigration? Is it people delaying their retirement age? There are a lot of solutions we can put on the table,” he said.
There are currently around 100,000 unfilled positions across the province, according to Dorval.
And the need for workers is growing. Over the next 10 years, 1.5 million jobs will need to be filled in Quebec, Dorval said. Most of those positions will be opening due to retirement.
There are enough people currently in Quebec’s education system to fill only a little more than half of those jobs, Dorval said.
For the Liberal Party, the shortage of labour has become central to the campaign.
“When I sit down with companies, what do they talk about? Talent, talent, talent — that’s all they talk about,” said Dominique Anglade, the Liberal candidate in Saint-Henri–Sainte-Anne. “That’s the single biggest challenge we have and if we don’t fix it, our economy could be severely impacted.”
Anglade, the incumbent economy minister, said the short-term solution is immigration. Quebec, quite simply, needs more workers.
Education will also play a role, she said. Quebec needs to do a better job of ensuring that students graduate from school and study subjects that prepare them for the jobs of the future.
The Liberals would also incentivize older people to stay in the workforce longer and the party wants to get people who are underrepresented in the workforce — like Indigenous people and people with handicaps — working.
Modernizing the economy, encouraging automation and the development — and use — of artificial intelligence, will also play a role, Anglade said.
For the Coalition Avenir Québec, improving graduation rates, coupled with a focus on ensuring that all immigrants integrate, is the “ideal solution” for the labour shortage, said François Bonnardel, the party’s candidate in Granby.
While the CAQ wants to reduce the number of immigrants to the province, Bonnardel said the party wants to ensure that every immigrant who does arrive is successful in the province.
The party also wants to improve the recognition of foreign credentials.
Improving graduation rates will also help the CAQ achieve one of its other economic goals, Bonnardel said, which is to increase the median income of Quebecers.
In 2016, Quebec had the lowest after-tax median household income in Canada. (When it comes to before-tax median employment income, the province is in the middle of the pack.)
Quebec’s shortage of labour is the main issue “for companies, maybe, but for Quebecers, and for the government of Quebec, it’s the average salary. We have to increase the average salary,” CAQ Leader François Legault said.
The aging population is a concern for the CAQ as well.
Forty years ago, there were nine workers for every retired person in Quebec. Now, the ratio is closer to two to one, Bonnardel said. Only Japan’s population is aging faster than Quebec’s, he said.
Bonnardel said he’d like to see incentives to encourage older workers to stay in the workforce.
Other economic issues are also important to the CAQ.
“We want Investissement Québec to be more present in all the regions of Quebec, not just concentrated in Montreal and Quebec City,” Bonnardel said.
He’d like to see it become a onestop shop to support business and help businesses develop new markets in Europe, so they’re less dependent on trade with the United States.
The Parti Québécois also sees immigration as part of the solution to the labour shortage. The party wants the province’s auditor general to assess how many economic immigrants the province can welcome properly, said JeanMartin Aussant, the PQ candidate in Pointe-aux-Trembles.
“We want to depoliticize this issue,” Aussant said. “It can lead to very ugly debates.”
Increasing productivity will also play a role in helping the province deal with the aging population.
“If one future worker can produce the output of two, three workers of the past, that will partially answer the question,” he said. “Immigration is part of the answer, productivity is part of the answer, but we have to address all solutions at once.”
Aussant said he believes an independent Quebec would have a stronger economy.
Federal taxes are used to develop industries in other parts of Canada, he said, “and then they boast when they send us an equalization cheque.”
Repatriating the federal tax money would give Quebec more money to develop its green energy industry and build a stronger economy, he said.
“One very concrete example of that is when we give billions and billions of tax breaks to the oil industries,” he said. “That does not help Quebec at all.”
For Québec solidaire, the environment is the main focus of the party’s economic plan.
“Economy and ecology are related,” said Simon Tremblay-Pepin, the party’s candidate in Nelligan. “We live on a planet; that is the basis of what we can use and transform so we can live well on it. If we don’t take care of this environment, the economy itself doesn’t matter.”
Québec solidaire wants to move away from a fuel-based economy, replacing it with a greener one. That transition would include billions in funding for public transit and support for the development of less-polluting industries.
Tremblay-Pepin said he believes the plan will create jobs and economic growth.
As for the labour shortage, immigration will play a role, he said, but some sectors of the population, “mostly people from visible minorities, people from Aboriginal communities,” still need jobs, he said.
“We have failed, and especially the Liberal government has failed, to include these people in the workforce,” he said.
Québec solidaire would offer free university tuition, which Tremblay-Pepin said would allow more people to become educated, helping to create a more specialized workforce adapted to the needs of the future.
Arvind K. Jain, a finance professor at Concordia University, noted that the province is benefiting from public finances that are now in order. “In the past business booms, when the U.S. economy was doing very well, we were not doing so well, so we have improved our norm,” he said. And that in turn has made private-sector investors more confident about investing in Quebec.
But the parties have not adequately shown where they’ll find the money to pay for all their promises, Jain said.
While all four parties used a financial framework created by the Ministry of Finance — and judged plausible by the auditor general — the parties have all found savings and/or new sources of revenue not foreseen in the report.
And here, too, Quebec’s aging population may pose a problem.
The pre-election report and the plans introduced by the parties count on economic growth to fund promises, notes Luc Godbout, the research chair in taxation and of public finance research at Université de Sherbrooke.
But with the aging population, he warns, economic growth could slow and he’s not sure the political parties have integrated that into their plans.
“We’re living through a demographic change,” he said — and that shift will leave the state with less revenue and more demand for spending.
Is it education? Is it immigration? Is it people delaying their retirement age? There are a lot of solutions we can put on the table.
JEAN-GUY CÔTÉ, associate director, Institut du Québec