How a town famous for xenophobia fell in love with immigrants

Significant change. The original code of conduct was issued when I was DG of Multiculturalism at Canadian Heritage along with the Bouchard-Taylor hearings.

May be a harbinger of change in rural Quebec:

For years, the small town of Hérouxville in rural Quebec was the embodiment in the province of deep, nativist hostility toward immigrants.

The town didn’t have any immigrants, but it once adopted a code of conduct that left no doubt that they, and their perceived customs, were unwelcome.

Hérouxville, the code warned, did not tolerate “stoning women to death in the town square” or “burning them alive” or “treating them as slaves.” The people of Hérouxville, it cautioned, celebrated Christmas and didn’t cover their faces, except maybe for Halloween.

The code tapped into a pervasive fear in Canada’s only French-speaking province that immigration would dilute its culture and also triggered a landmark provincial government commission that sought to build a consensus on the “reasonable accommodation” of ethnic minorities.

So it may come as a surprise that Hérouxville is now embracing immigrants and is eager to accommodate them.

“We’ve had a break from our past,” said Bernard Thompson, Hérouxville’s mayor and a onetime supporter of the code. “We now want as many immigrants as possible.”

The sharp shift in this small town’s attitude comes as Canada is seeking to open its doors even wider to immigrants as a crucial strategy for its economic vitality.

Canada’s federal government has announced plans to welcome record numbers of new immigrants over the next three years, with the goal of adding 1.45 million immigrants to the country’s population of 39 million. In contrast to other Western nations, where immigration has cleaved societies and fueled the rise of political extremism, there is a broad consensus in Canada over the value of immigration.

The only outlier has been Quebec, where politicians have fanned anti-immigrant sentiments by seizing on French Québécois voters’ fears of losing their cultural identity.

But even in Quebec, against the backdrop of demographic imperatives and changing social attitudes, there are signs of change in places like Hérouxville.

Hérouxville’s reversal on immigration stemmed from a combination of factors, including an aging population, a low birthrate, the need to fill an acute labor shortage, but also profound shifts in views among younger generations and the personal journeys of individuals like Thompson.

If asked, the mayor said, he would even allow Muslim immigrants to use a vacant office in the City Hall building as a prayer room — although he was not legally bound to do so.

“If we’re unable to respect each other’s culture, whether it’s religious or not, I think that’s a mistake,” the mayor said. “We have to show an openness.”

Thompson is also the top elected official of the county of Mékinac — which includes Hérouxville and its population of 1,336 as well as nine other small towns, some of which once supported Hérouxville’s code of conduct. In a sharp departure from the past, when perhaps one or no immigrant settled in the county in a given year, Mékinac attracted a record number of immigrants in the past two years — 60 — from South America, Africa, Europe and elsewhere.

One of them, Habiba Hmadi, 40, arrived in the county over a year ago from Tunisia, along with her husband and their elementary school-age son and daughter. Both French speakers who speak Arabic at home, Hmadi works as an insurance agent and her husband as a welder.

Being away from their families was hardest during Ramadan and other holidays, Hmadi said. Hmadi said she had never heard of Hérouxville’s code of conduct and had been welcomed warmly by locals.

“We got many phone calls or even people knocking on our door to ask if we needed anything,” Hmadi said. “One of our neighbors knocked on our door with a big bag of toys for our kids. We didn’t even know her. We were still moving in.”

The influx of immigrants was the result of a sweeping pro-immigration policy adopted by the county in 2017 — a decade after Hérouxville passed its code of conduct in 2007.

The code’s main author was a councilor at the time, André Drouin, who died in 2017. Drouin and Thompson, the current mayor, lived across the street from each other. They regularly got together and, over glasses of wine, discussed to what extent Quebec’s French Québécois majority should accommodate immigrants and other minorities.

The town of Hérouxville’s webmaster at the time, Thompson said he edited Drouin’s draft of the code, correcting spelling and grammatical mistakes, as well as cutting what seemed to him excessive references to Christmas trees. He watched Drouin, a charismatic individual, lead the council in unanimously ratifying the code and rally locals behind it.

“André could have sold a fridge to an Eskimo, as we say here,” Thompson recalled.

But Thompson — who had worked in telecommunications for decades in Montreal — said he grew increasingly uncomfortable with the code’s most fiery passages. He couldn’t deny that nearly everyone in Quebec was “the son of immigrants,” he said. He “adored” his brother’s longtime partner, a Muslim woman.

Eventually, Thompson broke with his neighbor and, after being elected mayor, led a push to jettison the code into the town archives. The mayor said he wanted to restore the town’s reputation, and the urgency to attract immigrants grew with the worsening labor shortage afflicting Mékinac county’s agricultural, forestry, industrial and service industries.

“We need immigration to survive,” Thompson said. “We don’t have a choice.”Still, politicians tapped into anti-immigrant feelings among older, rural voters in the recent provincial election. Jean Boulet — who served as provincial immigration minister until recently and who is from the town next to Hérouxville — said falsely that “80% of immigrants go to Montreal, don’t work, don’t speak French and don’t adhere to the values of Quebec society.”

Outside a convenience store in Hérouxville, a woman and a man smoking cigarettes said they still supported the code of conduct.

They said that a group of Muslim cyclists was once seen crossing the main road, not at a traffic light, but at a spot where one of them stopped oncoming cars“Look, they’re not in their country,” said the man, Jean-Claude Leblanc, 72.

They were still seething about widely reported stories of sugar shacks — establishments that serve traditional food from Quebec and where maple syrup is produced — that had removed pork to draw Muslim patrons. They had even heard of Muslims patrons praying inside some sugar shacks.

“Inside our sugar shacks,” said the woman, who declined to give her name. “Ours.”

For Eva-Marie Nagy-Cloutier, 32, a resident of Hérouxville, however, the code was a relic of the past.

“We’re of the generation where you can be who you want to be and with whom you want to be,” said Nagy-Cloutier, who works in human relations at Pronovost, a local snowblower maker, and recruits immigrant workers.

Abdelkarim Othmani, 33, left his home in southern Tunisia nearly two years ago and has been working the evening shift at Pronovost as a machinist. During the last Ramadan, he was allowed to take his meal break early so that he could break his fast after sunset.

Othmani said he socialized and worked out at a local gym with co-workers on weekends.

“I love the atmosphere,” said Othmani, who is planning to marry and eventually bring to Quebec his Tunisian girlfriend — or his “blonde,” one of the several Québécois slang words he slipped into his French.

His best friend is Alex Béland-Ricard, 29, with whom he carpools to work every day. A French Québécois born and raised in the county, Béland-Ricard said he was impressed by the newcomer’s strong commitment to friendship, family and hard work.

“Karim’s the first immigrant I ever met,” Béland-Ricard said. “I hope many more come here.

Source: How a town famous for xenophobia fell in love with immigrants

Once wary of immigrants, Canadian town sends out global labor SOS

Fast forward to 2022, and it’s actively courting new arrivals.

The town council’s once deep-seated fear over accommodating immigrants at the expense of its French-speaking identify has given way to a more pressing concern: a need for more families to help fill jobs, attend its schools and sustain its population.

Herouxville now wants to be known for its inclusion. It’s considering measures like subsidised housing to lure more immigrants.

“A new family, no matter where they are from, if we can welcome them here we are pleased to do it,” said Bernard Thompson, mayor of the town of 1,300 people in central Quebec. “The needs are huge in the rural areas.” 

Herouxville’s outreach is a response to a wider quandary facing Quebec, Canada and many other countries, to varying degrees, as governments from London and Washington to Canberra and Tokyo balance public and political pressure to curb immigration against crippling labour shortages.

Ageing populations, a surge in workers retiring and Covid travel and business chaos are among factors contributing to the sta! crunch hitting both low-paid and skilled occupations, from hospitality and manufacturing to transport and agriculture.

Canada has the worst labour shortages in the Western world, according to the latest OECD data from late 2021. Its plight has been exacerbated by a record wave of retirements this year. The problem is particularly dire in rural Quebec, o”en overlooked by a limited pool of newcomers who prefer to stay in Montreal.

The latest Canadian census data puts new numbers to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s drive to ramp up immigration to plug the sta! and skills gaps, which economists say are pushing up wages and threaten to drag down productivity.

Immigrants now account for 23 per cent of Canada’s population, up from 21.9 per cent in 2016, with newcomers accounting for 80 per cent of the country’s labour force growth over the last five years, the census released by Statistics Canada on Wednesday showed.

The census also paints a portrait of urban landings, with more than 90 per cent of recent immigrants living in a city, leaving smaller towns and rural areas grappling to attract newcomers to replace aging factory workers, grocery clerks and doctors.

QUEBEC’S IMMIGRANT CAP

Quebec, a mostly French- speaking province with broad control over its own immigration policy, is resisting change more than elsewhere in Canada. Just 14.6 per cent of its 8.3 million people were born overseas, far below the national average, the new data showed.

The Coalition Avenir Quebec government was re-elected this month pledging to cap permanent arrivals at 50,000 a year to safeguard the region’s language and culture. Immigration has been kept flat at around that level for years, even as Canada’s has risen 49 per cent since Trudeau’s Liberals took o!ice in late 2015.

Reflecting torn local sentiment, Quebec Premier Francois Legault has described immigrants as a source of wealth, though has also said

that allowing more people in without ensuring they speak French would be “suicidal”.

But Legault extended an olive branch to immigrants last week, setting a cabinet that included a trilingual immigration minister and a Black anti-racism minister.

RED CARPET TO NEWCOMERS

Quebec had 246,300 job vacancies as of July 2022 and just 185,100 unemployed people. The labour gap is particularly dire in manufacturing, where the region’s industry association estimating sta! shortages had cost them C$18 billion ($13 billion) in two years.

“Our labour force participation is under more pressure than elsewhere, because we are just not seeing the foreign workers to replace those that are retiring,” said Jimmy Jean, chief economist at financial services firm Desjardins Group in Montreal.

Jean said he expected the Quebec government to come under pressure from businesses to raise the immigration cap, adding that the province risked being le” behind economically by neighbouring Ontario and other large provinces Alberta and British Columbia.

It’s Quebec’s rural towns that are feeling the most acute pain as they have far less migrant pulling power than diverse Montreal, the province’s biggest city, which itself faces deep labour shortages.

That’s why local authorities are taking it upon themselves to roll out the red carpet to newcomers in places like Herouxville, which has long abandoned its code of conduct for immigrants.

Mayor Thompson said the code – unanimously approved by the town council in 2007 – was consigned to the town archives in 2010 by the council that he has run since 2009.

“It was never a legal document … and it is now a historical document,” he added. “It’s been a long time since the citizens and my town put this episode aside.”

Source: Once wary of immigrants, Canadian town sends out global labor SOS