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QUEBEC — The Parti Québécois (PQ) is banking on robots to respond to a labor shortage and replace temporary immigrants in the province’s fields and factories.

The Canadian Press obtained the robotization and automation component of the PQ plan to reduce immigration on the eve of its presentation on Monday.

The plan has been expected for several months and is a response to the pressure group Century Initiative, which advocates increasing Canada’s population to 100 million through immigration.

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The PQ plan proposes to reduce the number of temporary foreign workers in Quebec from 270,000 to 40,000, according to media reports.

“The number of temporary workers has increased at high speed and the labor shortage challenges are the same, if not worse in certain sectors,” said PQ leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon in a conversation with The Canadian Press published Sunday.

The party also wants to dispel “the myth, the gross lie, an erroneous assertion by certain lobbies” according to which immigration would respond to the labor shortage, since this persists despite the massive influx of new arrivals, he declared.

To fill vacant positions and the needs of businesses, the PQ prefers to rely on models from countries like South Korea, Japan or Germany, which are all affected by a labor shortage, but who have invested massively in research and robotization.

A PQ government would set up a special fund dedicated to robotization to finance companies making this shift, declared St-Pierre Plamondon. It would mandate the National Institute of Scientific Research to stimulate research and development projects in industrial, manufacturing and agricultural robotics.

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Finally, if the PQ comes to power, it would add an automation component to the provincial investment innovation program, targeting businesses with labor shortages, in addition to investing in the 2023 biofood innovation program -2028.

“For agriculture, it’s really a big challenge,” said St-Pierre Plamondon. “We are aware that we cannot remove all temporary workers at once from a sector which depends so much on them. »

Quebec’s delay in robotization can be attributed to the presence of an abundant and cheap workforce, which has served over the years as a brake on the automation of businesses, declared the PQ leader. For example, there are 176 robots per 10,000 employees in Canada, compared to 932 robots per 10,000 workers in South Korea, according to PQ documents.

“It’s a colossal delay,” declared St-Pierre Plamondon. “It’s interesting that countries that didn’t take the immigration route, like South Korea and Japan, ended up being much more robotic than us.”

More than a third of vacant positions in Quebec are found in three sectors that currently employ temporary immigrants, he said: production, where 16 percent of positions are vacant and the sector that lends itself most easily to robotization ; wholesale and retail trade, where 12 percent of positions are vacant; accommodation and catering, where 9% of positions are vacant, but a sector in which the challenge of robotization is more complex to meet.

The PQ document does not include information on the business investments needed for robotization or the government funding that would be required or estimates of the number of robots or devices that would need to be deployed.

The PQ leader declared that it is a political document and that his party’s program, which should be ready in two years, on the eve of the provincial elections, will contain precise and up-to-date facts.

“We have carried out several consultations, but no precise figures have been given. We say: “Here is the change in philosophy and approach and here are the lies we are exposing.” In a second phase, we will proceed sector by sector and evaluate the amounts to invest.

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