The sudden move has sparked criticism across an unusually broad coalition. And blindsided many newcomers

by Caitlin Walsh Miller The Walrus Apr. 30, 2026

Maleck Kadiri is Franco-Algerian. The thirty-six-year-old earned a master’s in microbiology and immunology from Université Laval, a PhD in immunology from Université de Sherbrooke, then completed two years of post-doctoral training in immuno-oncology at Université de Montréal. He’s been in Quebec for eleven years, training to do a highly specialized job: researching why some cancers don’t respond to immunotherapy treatments. But on March 3, he stopped working. That’s when his three-year post-graduation work permit expired. His application to renew it was refused, because he couldn’t demonstrate a clear pathway to permanent residence.

Months earlier, that pathway existed. Kadiri would have been eligible for the Programme de l’expérience québécoise (PEQ), a fast-track immigration pathway for foreign graduates—international students who graduated from Quebec universities—and skilled workers. Under the PEQ, he could have applied for permanent residence and renewed his work permit while the application processed. But this past November, François Legault’s Coalition Avenir Québec government abolished the program entirely.

The government’s main justification for abolishing the PEQ was reducing the number of temporary residents in Quebec. But immigration lawyer Laurence Trempe, former co-president of the Association québécoise des avocats et avocates en droit de l’immigration, an umbrella group of immigration lawyers in Quebec, says the logic is backward. “The more you restrict access to permanent residence, the bigger your pool of temporary residents becomes,” she says. Kadiri is a case in point: Santé Québec, the provincial health agency that employs him and desperately wants to retain him, started pursuing a Labour Market Impact Assessment to secure him a new temporary work permit, keeping him in the very status Quebec claims to want to reduce.

Across the province—and across sectors—employers are bracing for similar losses. More than 1,000 school employees and over 6,300 health care workers have permits expiring in 2026, along with daycare workers, restaurant and hotel staff, university professors, and more. And yet, even as these workers face removal, Quebec has resumed recruitment missions abroad, seeking the labour it now risks losing.

Quebec built an immigration system designed to attract French-speaking workers, promising a clear path to permanent residency—and then dismantled it with little warning, leaving thousands in limbo, employers scrambling, and the province’s international credibility in question.

Created in 2010 under then Premier Jean Charest’s Liberal government, the PEQ was designed as a fast-track to permanent residency for people already living in Quebec. It had two streams, one for international students and another for temporary foreign workers who had worked in the province. The idea was to prioritize people who spoke French and whom Quebec had already trained. (Another of the government’s stated reasons for closing the program was to protect the French language, despite already requiring PEQ applicants to demonstrate advanced French. Many were also native speakers.)

The PEQ pathway wasn’t guaranteed, but at least it was predictable. Applicants who met fixed criteria—typically a Quebec diploma or two years of skilled work in the province, along with advanced knowledge of French—could apply directly for a Quebec Selection Certificate, a required step toward permanent residency. There was no points competition or invitation system and little guesswork. The processing time was usually within six months. By 2016, nearly 10,000 selection certificates were issued through the program, a number that climbed by 50 percent in three years.

In 2019, a few months after the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) came to power, it introduced the first major reforms to the program, proposing sharp—and, critics argued, incoherent—restrictions on eligible occupations and fields of study. The list of allowed programs included ones that were obsolete, such as domestic sciences and pulp and paper engineering, as well as degrees international students couldn’t realistically access, including medicine, veterinary, and dentistry programs. On the jobs front, roles in health care and engineering were prioritized, while social work, most administrative positions, and service jobs were excluded. The move sparked a massive backlash, and the reforms were withdrawn within days.

Nevertheless, the government continued tightening the program in the years that followed. New rules added work-experience requirements for graduates who had previously qualified upon finishing their studies, lengthened timelines, imposed French-language requirements on spouses, and narrowed eligibility to certain in-demand occupations. Processing times ballooned.

In early 2023, Tiffany Corti, now thirty-seven, and her husband attended Québec en tête, a recruitment fair in Paris, France, sponsored by Quebec City’s economic development agency. There, employers, regional representatives, and immigration consultants pitched life in the province to prospective workers and what it would take to get permanent residency. Two paths were laid out. First, the Regular Skilled Worker Program, Quebec’s main skilled-worker immigration program, which selects applicants through a points-based system. It was described as a very uncertain process. The alternative was the PEQ: arrive on a work permit, complete 104 weeks of full-time work, then apply for permanent residency “quasi-automatically,” she recalls being told.

Through the recruitment fair, Corti secured a job as an administrative assistant, the same work she had done for years in the French public service. That summer, she, her husband, and their two young children—aged three and six at the time—arrived in Lévis, across the St. Lawrence River from Quebec City. She worked office hours while her husband, on an open work permit tied to hers, worked full time as well as evenings and on weekends. Child care was a constant puzzle: they had no support network in Quebec and were paying $60 a day for daycare for their daughter. It was hard, but they made it work.

By the spring of 2024, the federal government began tightening restrictions on temporary foreign workers, imposing hiring quotas and limiting eligibility for spousal work permits, while Quebec continued narrowing pathways to permanent residence. Immigration consultants advised her to change course. Though Corti had built her career as an administrative assistant, she had also earned a pastry diploma before leaving France, and pastry, she was told, was a shortage occupation. Switching fields would improve her chances of securing permanent residency. That November, she took a job—and a serious pay cut—as a pastry chef, continuing to accumulate the work experience she needed to meet the PEQ’s two-year requirement.

The month before, intake for the graduate stream was suspended. The worker stream followed in June 2025. At that point, Corti was two weeks shy of the two-year threshold. This past November, the PEQ was formally abolished.

In the place of the PEQ, the government instituted the Programme de sélection des travailleurs qualifiés (PSTQ). Corti and her husband had applied the day it opened this past July, submitting their files within the first hour. But under the new rules, applicants must declare a primary occupation and demonstrate two years of professional experience in it, including at least one year in Quebec. Corti was working as a pastry chef, but because the job was relatively new—a career switch made under immigration advice—she won’t meet that new threshold until November.

Unlike the PEQ, for which the criteria were fixed and transparent, the PTSQ relies on a points system that weighs factors such as education, work experience, French proficiency, and labour-market demand, but offers little clarity about how candidates are ranked or when invitations will be issued. Critics, including Trempe, who has appeared before Quebec’s Assemblée nationale to raise concerns about the program closure, say the new system lacks stability and transparency. “It’s like tax—you need to plan in advance,” says Trempe. “If the tax rules changed every year, it would be very hard to plan for. It’s the same thing with immigration.”

To strengthen his profile, Kadiri, the cancer researcher—who grew up in France and Algeria and wrote a PhD thesis in French—paid $450 to take a test to prove his fluency. And he received an invitation on March 19, but that’s just an invitation to apply for a Quebec Selection Certificate. Even after receiving an invitation, processing can take up to twelve months. According to Le Devoir, as of late April, just 110 selection certificates had been issued through the PSTQ since the program launched this past July, despite more than 10,000 invitations being sent.

Corti’s current work permit expired on March 24, though her employer has applied for a renewal. (She can continue working while the application is under review.) If any part of the process is refused, she could lose the right to work altogether. Her husband, who now manages security operations across dozens of Quebec government sites, is already in that position. When Corti’s permit expired, so did his, and he cannot renew due to federal restrictions that now limit spousal work permits to a narrower set of occupations that doesn’t include his. That means supporting a family of four on a pastry chef’s income, which Corti’s not sure will work.

After selling almost everything they owned in France, spending their savings to move to Quebec, they’re now facing the possibility of uprooting again with nothing left to cushion the blow. Neither Corti nor her husband have slept properly for months. “I have nightmares every night,” she says. So does her son, who’s now nine. At school, he’s learning that you have to keep your promises and face consequences if you don’t. He doesn’t understand, says Corti, why the government isn’t held to the same standard.

The backlash has been swift and unusually broad. Charles Milliard, the new leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, called the situation a symbol of the CAQ’s “improvisation” on immigration. A rare coalition of opposition has formed, speaking out against the government’s handling of the program, including the Liberals, Québec Solidaire, tourism and hospitality associations, the mayors of Montreal and Quebec City, the Union of Quebec Municipalities, labour unions, and chambers of commerce. “It’s not every day the business community and unions agree on something,” says Trempe.

Much of the anger has centred on the government’s refusal to grant a grandfather clause for workers and students already in Quebec, people—like both Kadiri and Corti—who had made plans under one set of rules, only for those rules to shift underfoot and then evaporate altogether. In the weeks following the closure of the program, Quebec immigration minister Jean-François Roberge refused to entertain the idea, while Legault dismissed grandfathering as “favouritism,” despite having granted transitional measures during earlier PEQ reforms.

In January, Legault resigned, triggering a leadership race that turned immigration—and the fate of the PEQ—into one of the campaign’s defining issues. Christine Fréchette and Bernard Drainville, both vying to replace him, distanced themselves from Legault’s hard line but stopped far short of agreement. Drainville proposed a narrowly targeted grandfather clause covering priority sectors, such as health care, education, manufacturing, and construction—an estimated 18,000 people—while Fréchette floated a broader plan to temporarily reopen the PEQ and grant transitional access to those already here.

The debate grew increasingly contentious. During the final leadership debate in late March, Fréchette refused to specify how many people her plan might affect, prompting criticism from Drainville. Days later, La Presse reported that internal estimates suggested her proposal could have allowed as many as 125,000 people to qualify—well above Quebec’s new annual immigration target of 45,000—fuelling accusations that the numbers were being downplayed.

The number of immigrants who might benefit from a grandfather clause has been a major point of contention. Roberge said an exemption would allow “hundreds of thousands” to apply for permanent residency; Legault put the number at 350,000, while Paul St-Pierre Plamondon—the leader of the Parti Québécois—warned it could be as many as 600,000 and asylum seekers could be eligible. Immigration lawyers say those figures are wildly misleading. Provincial data shows that between 5,900 and 25,000 selection certificates were issued annually under the PEQ between 2020 and 2023.

On April 10, a group of roughly thirty plaintiffs filed a motion in the Superior Court of Quebec seeking a declaratory judgment that the government committed a fault by recruiting immigrants with promises of permanent residence, then abolishing the program without warning. As reported in Le Devoir, the lawyer leading the case, Gérard Samet, is not currently seeking damages but argues that a ruling recognizing fault could lay the groundwork for future claims.

On April 12, Fréchette won the leadership with 58 percent of the vote and became premier. She promised to move quickly to reopen the PEQ. But implementation has proved slower than her campaign rhetoric suggested. In her first press conference, she said changes would come “in a few days,” pending preparatory steps by the ministry. More than a week later, she named a new cabinet, stripping Jean-François Roberge—the minister who oversaw the PEQ’s closure—of the immigration portfolio and appointing François Bonnardel, with an explicit mandate to restore the program. Bonnardel has said the PEQ will be quickly brought back—with a “more humane approach” to “take care of those that had been forgotten”—though no timeline has been announced. But even if delivered, the promise faces a numbers problem: Quebec has capped annual economic immigration at 29,000, and immigration lawyers point out that reopening the PEQ while continuing the PSTQ would exceed that, meaning not everyone waiting will be able to stay. Public sentiment is clear: a Léger poll from this spring found that 83 percent of Quebecers believe immigrants who already have jobs and are well established in the province should be allowed to stay.

Despite the political maneuvering and public support, many caught in limbo are opting to leave. Trempe says French-speaking clients who might once have settled permanently in Quebec are now applying through the federal Express Entry system and accepting invitations from other provinces, including Manitoba, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, and New Brunswick, prioritizing stability over geography. Quebec’s reputation abroad has been harmed, Trempe says. “The damage will take a while to be fixed. If they keep changing the rules all the time, people won’t trust us.”

The rules could change once again after the provincial election in October, though it’s hard to say how. The PQ has led the polls for two years, but is now polling neck and neck with the Liberals. The CAQ, meanwhile, is projected to win zero seats, a forecast unchanged under Fréchette, despite a modest bump in support following the leadership race.

And even though their new leader has promised to reopen the program, for many, the consequences are already in motion. Every month, hundreds more work permits expire. By the time voters head to the polls this fall, Kadiri may once again be prevented from conducting his cancer research, and Corti’s son may still be having nightmares. Across Quebec, families are making tough decisions, pulling kids from daycare, abandoning dreams, some leaving the province they were encouraged to call home.

https://thewalrus.ca/quebec-immigrants-permanent-residency/