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Quebec Promised Francophone Immigrants a Fast Track to Permanent Residency—Then Changed Its Mind

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

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.

The CAQ government abolished a program that fast-tracked permanent residency for skilled workers in Quebec

New immigration criteria operate on a points-based system with little clarity on which candidates will get accepted

83 percent of Quebecers believe already established immigrants should be allowed to stay

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.

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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........

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