The Canadian province lacks arms and wishes to bring in qualified foreign workers or contractors. The concern is that the procedure to immigrate takes time, as evidenced by Alexandre Faure, a shoemaker who has been living in Montreal for five years.
150,000 is the estimated amount of French people living in Montreal, making it the first tricolor community outside Europe. Several thousand newcomers come to swell these troops each year, attracted by the wide-open spaces offered by Quebec. Alexandre Faure settled with his partner five years ago in Montreal. They have just completed their immigration procedures. “With hindsight, I would say it’s easy, he says, but when we were in the basic visa renewal stages, it was always difficult times, there is uncertainty. We can’t land in Quebec, say we settle here, then it’s settled!”
Working alone, Alexandre Faure, 29, has no recruitment problem, but this is not the case for his partner who is really struggling to find employees in the pet store she runs. “She is constantly looking for new people and it is almost her daily job to recruit, he testifies. Even without Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine, the labor shortage in Canada has always been a reality, much more than in France, but it is also what allowed us to arrive and then to make a place for ourselves by showing that we wanted to work and that we worked seriously, in the French way.”