Quebec has emerged as the province with the highest job vacancy rate among the Canadian provinces, according to the latest Help Wanted report of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB). The report states that the job vacancy rate of Quebec is 4.1 percent, which is 0.8 percentage points above the national average. The rate is also 0.5 percentage points above any other province.
Quebec reported 120,800 vacancies at the end of the first quarter of 2019. This huge number reveals how difficult it is for the employers of this French-speaking province to find employees for filling the vacant positions. Quebec is the second most populous province of Canada. Though Ontario has more number of vacancies at 174,800, the population of the province is also larger, which means the job vacancy rate is only 3.3 per cent.
The Skilled Worker immigration system of Quebec is currently stalled as it is undergoing an overhauling process in order to improve the integration of immigrants. But this has left the employers in the province in lurch as they have nowhere to search for employees.
The Coalition Avenir Quebec government has announced its plan to gradually increase the immigration levels, starting from 2020. Earlier in 2019, the number of immigrants to be admitted by Quebec had been cut down by 20 percent to 40000. As per the new proposal, Quebec will welcome 44,500 new immigrants in 2020, 47,500 in 2021 and 52,500 by 2022.
Canada’s national job vacancy rate has also been steadily climbing for the past two years and it reached another record high last quarter, according to Ted Mallett, CFIB’s vice-president and chief economist. The industries in Canada that face the biggest difficulty in filling positions include construction, with a 4.9 per cent vacancy rate, and personal services, at 4.7 per cent. The other sectors which have vacancy rates above the national average are agriculture (3.8 per cent), hospitality (3.7 per cent), professional services (3.6 per cent) and transportation (3.6 per cent).
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