MONTREAL — Every month, Line Breton’s company leaves about $1 million on the table.

That isn’t to say she’s a lousy businessperson—quite the opposite—or that her firm, duBreton, is unprofitable. As North America’s largest pork producer that is certified humane, duBreton has turned pigs into pork, and that pork into products like bacon, cretons and the like, in Quebec’s La Beauce region since 1944.

Yet Breton says she has missed out on $1 million every month for the last year. Why? Because she hasn’t been able to secure enough workers to produce duBreton’s organic pork products for a hungry chunk of the American market. Most galling, she says, is that the problem is almost entirely inflicted by the federal government, which is cutting back on the number of temporary foreign workers allowed into the country, and the province, which is threatening to do the same.

We’ll get to the (often painfully silly) reasons behind these reductions in a second. But first, that million bucks. In May 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a California animal-welfare law barring the sale of pork raised “in a cruel manner.” Compared to organic chicken and beef, organic pork was an underserved market even before California’s law. Breton rightfully saw serving the biggest state economy in the U.S. as a boffo business opportunity. 

“We had a window of a year and a half, maybe two years, before American producers could transform their production to conform to the law. We wanted to respond right away, but we couldn’t muster the workforce to meet the demand,” Breton told me.

DuBreton’s problem underscores an abiding food chain issue in Quebec and the rest of the country. Though Canadians very much like to eat, they aren’t generally amenable to performing the often-backbreaking work necessary to grow food and get it to their tables. For more than half a century, the Temporary Foreign Workers Program has remedied this market inefficiency, by allowing workers from abroad to do jobs Canadians won’t. Despite the ever-growing demand for their services, the Quebec and federal governments are bent on reducing their numbers.

In the feds’ case, the percentage of the workforce that can be drawn from the Temporary Foreign Worker Program will drop from 30 to 20 per cent beginning in May, with exceptions for those in the construction and health sectors. The reason, as Immigration Minister Marc Miller put it in March, was that the country had become “addicted” to temporary workers. 

He’s right. The number of permits issued to foreign workers increased by over 150 per cent, to nearly 693,000, between 2022 and 2023. If anything, though, this is a reflection of an incredibly tight labour market, as well as Canadians’ propensity to steer clear of the nation’s fields and abattoirs. We are indeed addicted to foreign workers. Yet arbitrarily cutting their numbers is hardly a cure. 

What’s more—and this can’t be emphasized enough—temporary workers themselves are uniquely vulnerable to abuse, even though the federal government data released last autumn says 94 per cent of Ontario companies abide by its regulations aimed at protecting them. Quebec, meanwhile, has strict rules governing the workers’ accommodations, salary and job conditions. The province has doubled down on enforcement of these rules, with its workplace safety board meting out 97 infractions last year—seven times more than the year before. 

Of course, Quebec’s crackdown on temporary workers has less to do with safety than the language they speak when toiling within its borders. The 167,000 or so temporary foreign workers in the province have in fact become handy scapegoats in the Coalition Avenir Québec government’s long-running fight against the alleged decline of French in the province. 

Earlier this month, Premier François Legault threatened to hold a referendum on immigration should the federal government not reduce immigration into the province or hand over full power on the file. Though they serve a crucial part of the economy, Legault contends they are a drain on Quebec’s resources and a threat to its linguistic identity. Speaking to reporters earlier this month about federal housing announcements, he demanded that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “go to the root of the problem,” adding, “There are too many temporary immigrants.”

To put it charitably, this argument is blinkered. First, the province has had control over the volume of temporary workers, along with permanent residents and economic immigrants, for more than 30 years. Second, the French language isn’t under siege—a fact laid bare in a recent report by none other than the Office québécois de la langue français, which said the use of the language has remained stable in the province since 2007. 

Legault’s demagoguery is also sabotaging the Quebec economy. Temporary workers do jobs Quebecers themselves won’t do. Take them away, and the work won’t get done. “One out of two Quebec businesses refuse new contracts because they don’t have the necessary workers,” Karl Blackburn, president of the province’s business lobby, told me recently. The math is simple. If only the politics were, too. 

Martin Patriquin is The Logic’s Quebec correspondent. He joined in 2019 after 10 years as Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. A National Magazine Award and SABEW winner, he has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Walrus, Vice, BuzzFeed and The Globe and Mail, among others. He is also a panelist on CBC’s “Power & Politics.”