Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon will be Quebec’s newest premier following the recent election, with the Parti Québécois securing a minority government.
Since winning the election, Plamondon has vowed to fight federal immigration targets for the province and to take greater control of overall immigration in Quebec, an issue he’s talked about at length in the past.
Before the election, Plamondon railed against the “Century Initiative,” a plan co-founded by Mark Wiseman and Dominic Barton, who were both granted prominent advisory and board positions by Prime Minister Mark Carney.
For those who haven’t heard of it, the Century Initiative is a plan to increase Canada’s population to 100 million by 2100 through mass immigration.
“Even on permanent immigration, we are more or less in the targets of the Century Initiative because they went overboard. They went way further than the Century Initiative,” Plamondon said in the Quebec Legislature back in 2024. “They went further than their target, and so when they reduce it, if you take the average, we are within the Century Initiative, and that Century Initiative is wrong.”
Plamadon said the mass immigration plan was “based on the very stupid assumption” that growing the GDP makes a country richer.
“Even a CEGEP student understands that growing the size of your economy has nothing to do with wealth. So they can’t be that stupid,” Plamondon said. “They had an intention. In the same way that saying that more immigration, higher immigration will solve the worker shortage, the evidence is worldwide, is constant, and it’s the same case for Ontario and Quebec.”
He said proponents of the plan and media outlets will have to be accountable for “misinforming the population.”
“It had such a tremendous impact on our society. I can’t believe that we went through those lies for so many years. Good thing that we’re not in that environment anymore,” he said. “But do I trust them? Do I trust any word of what they say on that topic? The answer is no.”
A look at the Parti Québécois platform shows that Quebec’s new government wants to dramatically reduce immigration and have more say over the types of immigrants they bring into the province.
According to the Parti Québécois platform, Plamondon wants to reduce temporary immigration by 50 per cent, a reduction of 200,000 to 250,000 people.
The Parti Québécois also want to set permanent immigration thresholds at approximately 35,000 new permanent residents per year and have a complete moratorium on new permanent economic immigration from abroad.
Instead of accepting new permanent economic immigrants from outside of Quebec, the party wants to “select permanent residents from among temporary immigration, composed of foreign students and temporary foreign workers”
The party also wants to “tighten the selection criteria” for temporary foreign workers while exempting certain fields that are essential and currently need workers.
Quebec’s new government also wants to “Make a shift towards automation and robotization of sectors of our economy experiencing labour shortages,” rather than accepting more immigration.
As a Quebec separatist party, the new government also states that “until Quebec’s independence,” it wants to reduce the number of asylum claimants it accepts to a “proportional” level to the province’s demographic weight in Canada; in other words, only 22 per cent of Canada’s asylum seekers.
As a minority government, the Parti Québécois government will have to work with either the Quebec Liberal Party, which won 40 seats, or the Conservative Party of Quebec, which won 19 seats, to get bills passed.
Not a fan of quebec or its separatist party. However on this issue, they are bang on! Now if my weathervane, govern-by-the-polls Ontario premier dug frod would grow some scruples, we could join the show and start to be a responsible province.
Speaks more sense in a week than the liberal party in over a decade.