MONTREAL — The tech bros were restive.

It was November 2019, and roughly 20 entrepreneurs from the Quebec chapter of the scale-up business-advocacy group Council of Canadian Innovators (CCI) were seated around a table in an office in Old Montreal. At its head was Pierre Fitzgibbon, Quebec’s minister of economy and innovation. And yes, this being tech, middle-aged white dudes in business casual were well represented. 

The topic of discussion was the province’s tech sector. Montreal’s academic plunge into the realm of artificial intelligence in the early 1990s had begat a booming marketplace for tech-suffixed startups in the city: fintech, proptech, healthtech, agtech, cleantech. All and more were represented around that table—and all wanted to know why Fitzgibbon’s government was kneecapping their business plans.

Why, they wondered, had the governing Coalition Avenir Québec cut immigration just as they were starved for programmers, developers, executives and other well-paid sector types? Fitzgibbon, who usually draws much of the oxygen in a crowd, was uncharacteristically quiet. At the end of the minutes-long kvetch session, Fitzgibbon nodded. “Yeah, we messed that one up,” he said, according to two sources who were at the meeting, and who requested anonymity to speak freely about the private meeting. Fitzgibbon promised his government would do something about it.

In a LinkedIn message, Fitzgibbon told me he’s always been in favour of increasing the number of economic immigrants to the province, but that he’d be “very surprised” if he indeed said these words the two sources heard him say. Nevertheless, Fitzgibbon’s very presence at a closed-door meeting with a gaggle of Montreal’s most successful tech entrepreneurs is a big deal, if only because his CAQ government was just over a year into a mandate won in large part by appealing to the baser fears of a very different subset of Quebecer. These fears, in a nutshell:those beyond Quebec’s borders are a constant threat to the French language and Quebec culture.

CAQ leader François Legault promised to cut immigration by over 20 per cent to 40,000 a year, and suggested the floodgates would remain wide open under his opponent, then-premier Philippe Couillard. “I think Quebecers have the right to know what Philippe Couillard’s target is. How many immigrants does he plan on receiving in the next few years?” Legault said during the 2018 campaign, as though Couillard were some multiculturalist hustler trading away Quebec’s identity for political gain. Legault’s stance earned him praise from the likes of Marine Le Pen, the standard bearer of France’s xenophobic far right.

And yet, not three years after this noisy scapegoating, the CAQ is now doing what it once decried. According to the province’s 2021 immigration plan, released with little fanfare last fall, the government expects to increase to between 44,500 and 47,500 the number of immigrants allowed into the province, with an additional 7,000 to make up for 2020’s pandemic-stricken decrease. 

All told, the province will accept as many as 54,500 immigrants in 2021, which is more than the Liberals did in the party’s last year in government. And as Fitzgibbon’s audience of restive eggheads suggests, Quebec’s tech leaders were among the loudest voices trying to make the government see the error of its ways.

To be sure, Quebec’s labour shortage isn’t new, or unique to the tech sector. There is a funhouse mirror aspect to the statistics, wherein Quebec’s small- and medium-sized businesses say they had the same recruitment problems in COVID-addled 2020 as before, according to a Business Development Bank of Canada poll—even though the unemployment rate is significantly higher. This suggests the demand for workers in tech and beyond more than offsets the loss of jobs in the decimated restaurant, retail and tourism industries. 

Mario Sabourin, who runs recruitment firm 4-i Canada, went so far as to hire a lobbyist to petition the government to increase Quebec’s immigration rates, because he couldn’t fill the surging demand for welders, mechanics, truck drivers and health-sector workers brought on by COVID-19. “Businesses are focused on relaunching the economy post-COVID-19,” he told me. “I’ve got clients who are posting $125,000-a-year jobs and can’t fill them.” 

A perusal of job listings at Montreal’s larger tech firms—Lightspeed has 50 positions open in Quebec; Coveo, 120—is a small indication of the labour shortage’s breadth in the sector. There are 143,000 people employed in Quebec’s tech sector—a juggernaut that requires 6,500 new warm bodies a year just to keep rolling, according to a 2019 Techno Montréal white paper. 

And if the tech-labour shortage was a concern in 2019, it is downright grave today. One guy I spoke with said he has a running tally with other Montreal entrepreneurs as to how often they steal employees from one another. “Everybody’s poaching from everyone else,” the guy, who didn’t want me to publish his name, told me. “We basically have to do it to each other.”

Since the outset of the pandemic and the ensuing teleworking wave, American companies have been eagerly poaching, as well. This guy’s startup, which has raised over US$100 million from the likes of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec and other Canadian blue-chip investors, has lost two software developers to a Silicon Valley unicorn in the last month.

“It’s been a … challenge,” says Pierre-Philippe Lortie, director of government and public affairs at the CCI. Lortie lobbies various ministries of the Quebec government on behalf of the CCI, pushing them to recognize the importance of the tech sector as well as for a spot in the budget for attracting, training and retaining workers in Quebec’s innovation and technology sector. (Lortie was at the CCI meeting with Fitzgibbon, but wouldn’t comment on what the minister said.)

Lortie is quick to note how happy he is that the government is taking in more immigrants. Yet frustration often betrays his polished diplomacy. “It has not become more efficient to hire specific types of tech jobs in the province. I’m not saying it’s all bad, but our entrepreneurs and CEOs are crying for them,” he told me.

The Quebec government is at least listening. Apart from upping the immigration numbers, Legault has largely dismissed attempts to push forward with further identity measures. His government has stalled on giving Bill 101, Quebec’s language law, more teeth, much to the dismay of certain language hawks.

Yet the province’s onerous Bill 21, which prohibits the wearing of religious symbols by many government workers, remains the law of the land—drawing both ire from the rest of Canada and abroad. Perhaps more concretely for would-be immigrants, it takes roughly three years to gain permanent residence in Quebec, or about six times longer than anywhere else in the country. If only Legault would break a few more of his election promises.

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 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.” @MartinPatriquin