In Quebec City, majestic stone fortifications have stood for hundreds of years, a monument to the days when French colonists erected them to keep out the enemy. Today, the city faces the opposite challenge — how to entice more outsiders to come in.

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Businesses around the world are looking for workers, but in the capital of Canada’s second-largest province, they’re another level of desperate. The local unemployment rate hovers around 2.5 per cent, near the lowest of any North American city over 500,000 people.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has thrown open the doors wide to newcomers, boosting Canada’s immigration targets and giving the country the fastest population growth among advanced economies. They mostly stay away from the French-speaking Quebec City area, however: The region received fewer than 20,000 immigrants over the past six years. Montreal’s metropolitan area, which is about five times larger by population, has received 12 times as many immigrants.

At the Cochon Dingue, a bustling Parisian-style restaurant in the heart of the city’s business district, owner Pierre Moreau looks out at the lunchtime crowd and knows he’s operating too lean.

Before the pandemic, Moreau employed about 900 people at his Restos Plaisirs group, which operates 11 restaurants and a “prêt-à-manger” that makes boxed lunches for companies and events. Today, he has about 750.

What he really needs is another 100 staff — or a robot that can cut vegetables, Moreau says wryly. Instead, he’s making compromises, hiring people who are available to work as little as one day a week and reducing the operating hours at his restaurants to maintain the level of service.

The smaller businesses will die, and then the market will recover

Pierre Moreau

“It’s exhausting,” Moreau says. “We will be cutting our margins for a while. We won’t make much profit. The smaller businesses will die, and then the market will recover.”

A few miles away, at the headquarters of Techsol Marine, Francois Lessard laments the opportunities he’s missing. The company, which designs and assembles electrical systems for ships, has been unable to fill some skilled positions for two to three years. The pool of local talent is so shallow that he’s considering moving some work to India.

“When you lose a contract because you lack employees, it’s definitely frustrating,” said Lessard, Techsol’s chief executive officer. “We are talking about 25 per cent growth per year until 2029. If we want to be able to do that, it will take me a lot of people, and we will have to be imaginative.”

Quebec City’s worker shortage is exacerbated by its unique status as the only provincial or state capital in North America where French is the dominant language, which limits its appeal to foreign arrivals. As a result, it has become one of the oldest large cities in Canada. Local agencies calculate that there are just 88 workers in their twenties available for every 100 older workers getting ready to retire.

And the structure of the economy, including the huge imprint of the Quebec government, means fewer older people feel compelled to continue working later in their careers. Close to 40 per cent of the workforce is employed in the health, public administration, finance and insurance industries. In the public sector, most workers are in unionized jobs that include good pensions.

“Often, people have good working conditions,” said Abdoul Echraf, an economist with Quebec International, an economic development agency that tries to attract business to the region. “When they retire, they don’t need to stay part-time, and they will even retire earlier than elsewhere.”

‘I hire everywhere’

In the town of Sainte-Claire, less than an hour’s drive southeast of the capital, workers at the Volvo Group-owned Prevost factory take pride in building coach buses that will serve not only regular travellers, but the world’s biggest stars. About 30 Prevost buses will be used for Beyonce’s upcoming North American tour. The shells of the black armoured buses used by the U.S. president, known as Ground Force One, were also made by the firm.

The facility is bright, clean and filled with hydraulic equipment to reduce the amount of heavy lifting required — an automation strategy to make the factory a more attractive place to work for a broader number of people.

Vanessa Lemieux, 26, slides out from under a bus. Hired in September, Lemieux’s job is to attach 2,800-pound axles under the vehicles. “We don’t force much,” she said; all she needs is the strength to lift and hold a tool.

Prevost has pushed to recruit women by picturing them in online, newspaper and billboard advertisements. Women now represent one in five new hires, according to Francois Tremblay, president of the division. “We found a population that we did not reach before,” he said.

Everyone seems to agree that governments and businesses must do more to better welcome and integrate immigrants — and to nudge more older workers to stay in the workforce. Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of convincing retirees to work a little bit every week, says Quebec City Mayor Bruno Marchand. “If we can find the right incentives, a lot of people will want to keep working,” he said.

But for some firms, the solution is to think beyond the region entirely.

The pandemic, and the feasibility of remote working, has been a saviour for employers such as iA Financial Corp., an insurance and wealth-management firm that is the largest publicly traded company headquartered in Quebec City.

About half of its 9,000 employees work there, but many new hires can now be located elsewhere. “I hired an executive vice-president of human resources who lives in Ottawa, and I have no employees in Ottawa,” Chief Executive Officer Denis Ricard said. “I no longer have to rely on Quebec City only. I hire everywhere.”

Bloomberg.com