Legault: Small countries are great
François Legault doesn’t want to raise immigration, making much of the virtues of little countries like Switzerland and claiming there are advantages to keeping the population down.
The CAQ may be business-oriented, but not primarily. Quebec needs workers, but not, it seems, if they risk diluting (or polluting?) the Quebec population. Radio‑Canada looks into whether increasing immigration would really help the manpower shortage.
The PQ is going further, saying they would squelch immigration back to pre‑2003 levels.
In other election news, Legault says only a few intellectuals are interested in reforming the voting system – something he promised four years ago, then abandoned.
Ian 07:32 on 2022-09-06 Permalink
OK no intellectuals, no foreigners. Got it. Maybe this is a problem we can solve with clowns? Dumb ones de chez nous of course.
Tim S. 07:40 on 2022-09-06 Permalink
From the OECD (and a 1.5 second Google search): “Switzerland is in 3rd place in the OECD in terms of the share of immigrants in its population, with the foreign-born accounting for 26% of the total population. 24% of them arrived in the last 5 years compared with 22% on average across OECD countries.”
SMD 08:05 on 2022-09-06 Permalink
I believe that Switzerland makes it very difficult to get citizenship, however. I think that’s the model Legault would prefer: a subservient temporary foreign workforce that can be sent home at any time. No path to permanent residency or citizenship.
SMD 08:09 on 2022-09-06 Permalink
Related: Status for All march on Sept 18.
mare 08:48 on 2022-09-06 Permalink
Switzerland also has 4 official languages, so much advantage. Maybe Quebec should adopt a second official language so it doesn’t have to provide language classes (there are no teachers) to immigrants, but they can directly do grunt work in Trois-Rivières.
(It is indeed very hard to get Swiss citizenship. My mother was Swiss, but even I can’t get it. All foreign workers are on temporary visas, and those are not easily converted to PR visas like here.)
Ephraim 10:46 on 2022-09-06 Permalink
Does they realize how many people travel to Switzerland for work? The foreign population of Switzerland is over 25%. That’s 25% non-citizens in the country and still more who travel into Switzerland daily for work. In 2019 there were 325K people who travelled to work in Switzerland, daily! For a country of 8.6M people. That’s ENORMOUS. That’s likely about 4% of the workforce commuting in, daily.
Switzerland relies so heavily on foreign workers because they won’t give them citizenship. They give them only residency. But the downside of foreign workers are… they send money OUT of the country. In Switzerland, it’s even worse, if you live near the border, you shop outside the country all the time, it’s cheaper. But all these people who commute in to work, leave with their money too. They don’t spend but a few hours in Switzerland working and then spend all that into the economies of France, Germany and Italy.
I mean sure, Parizeau was a complete asshole, but at least he understood economics. You would think that someone that was a businessman would have a better grasp on what this will cost Quebec in the pocketbook