MONTREAL — The Quebec government has frozen two major immigration flows that provide a path to permanent residency, after complaining for years that the number of newcomers settling in the province threatened its language and culture.

The moratorium, however, comes on the same day that the provincial government announced that it planned to welcome up to 67,000 immigrants in 2025, several thousand more than in 2023 and than what was planned for 2024.

Speaking to reporters at the Legislative Assembly on Thursday, Immigration Minister Jean-François Roberge said that as of today, the province was suspending applications for the Quebec Experience Program, a pathway to permanent residence for international students who graduate in the province. In addition, the government stopped accepting candidates from the Regular Skilled Worker Program.

These two programs bring together the majority of economic immigrants to Quebec, whose selection is controlled by the provincial government. The other main components – family reunification and the refugee program – are largely controlled by the federal government.

The freeze will be maintained until June 2025 at the latest, the time it will take for the province to present its immigration plan for 2026, said Mr. Roberge. Calling the government’s moratorium “brave,” Roberge said suspending the programs would allow the province to gain more control over immigration.

In 2022, Prime Minister François Legault declared that it would be “suicidal” for the province to accept more than 50,000 immigrants per year, because of the threat they represent to the survival of the French language. But Roberge’s immigration plan, tabled Thursday, predicts the province will welcome up to 67,000 people in 2025. There were about 52,800 immigrants in 2023 and the province expects to welcome up to 61,450 in 2024.

Despite the increase in the number of newcomers predicted for 2025, Roberge says a higher percentage of them will speak French than in years past.

“2025 will be an exceptional year in the sense that for the first time, the proportion of immigrants knowing French will be around 80 percent,” he told journalists.

And because they will know French, Roberge said, hosting up to 67,000 people won’t pose as big a threat to Quebec’s language and culture. “When we change our analysis and we increase the number of French-speaking graduates in Quebec who integrate into Quebec, I think we can adjust our governance without denying anything about what has been said.”

In August, Quebec announced a six-month freeze on some applications for temporary foreign workers in Montreal, and in October the government introduced legislation to cap the number of international students in the province.

Quebec has fought with Ottawa over immigration in recent months, demanding more power to decide who can settle in the province and demanding that Ottawa forcibly relocate asylum seekers to other regions of the country.

In addition to people arriving in Quebec as permanent immigrants, the number of temporary immigrants has exploded in recent years. Quebec’s statistics agency says the number of temporary immigrants in the province — foreign workers, international students and refugee claimants — exceeded 560,000 in January 2024. The data also shows that Quebec welcomes 54 percent asylum seekers in Canada.

In the meantime, Thursday’s announcement aroused the ire of certain organizations representing Quebec’s business community.

“This will undoubtedly add a lot of pressure on small and medium-sized businesses,” the Canadian Federation of Independent Business said in a statement, adding that suspending the programs would exacerbate labor shortages.

Quebec Manufacturers and Exporters echoed this message, affirming that the government made this decision without consulting businesses and that it will have a negative impact on the economy of several regions of Quebec where there are thousands of positions vacancies in the manufacturing sector.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published October 31, 2024.

Joe Bongiorno, The Canadian Press