Demonstrations took place Monday morning in Quebec\u2019s two biggest cities to protest the end of the Quebec experience program (PEQ).<\/p>\n
The rally in Montreal was held in front of Immigration Minister Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Roberge\u2019s office. Another one was held simultaneously in front of the National Assembly in Quebec City.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re not just numbers; we\u2019re families, children, people,\u201d said Nadir Belaid, a student from Algeria who recently graduated. \u201cWe would like to be able to stay and develop not just Quebec, but a whole country of Canada. So for sure, we would like the PEQ to be reopened and have a clause that allow the people that are already here to stay.\u201d<\/p>\n
Until now, PEQ was one of the main routes to permanent residence for temporary workers and foreign students who had already settled in Quebec.<\/p>\n
The program offered a fast-track to permanent residency, with admissions continuous and unlimited.<\/p>\n
But the Legault government suspended it without notice in June, citing a need to better meet its immigration targets. The program is slated to be terminated on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Protesters on Monday demanded, at a minimum, a grandfather clause for people already living in Quebec.<\/p>\n
Belaid, who graduated in December 2024 and is on a work permit expiring in 2028, says the end of the PEQ puts his future projects in jeopardy.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd we definitely feel betrayed by the government of Quebec as they had this program which allowed not just me, but hundreds of thousands of other students, foreign workers to obtain permanent residency and have a chance to stay in Quebec and all,\u201d he said. \u201cBut now it\u2019s over and we feel extremely betrayed by what happened, and we\u2019re here today to make the government hear how we feel about the situation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also impacted is Andrea Hero, a Brazilian student who came to Quebec in 2022 with her husband. They have open work permits.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have a good jobs and jobs that is high demand in Quebec,\u201d Hero said. \u201cSo I work in a hostel, my husband is a electrical technician. So we have a good professional here. And I\u2019m doing my equivalence to become a nurse here, I\u2019m a nurse in my country.\u201d<\/p>\n
With the end of the PEQ, the Skilled Worker Selection Program (PTSQ) is now the only pathway to permanent residence in Quebec. It functions as a pool of candidates, from which the provincial government can select the number and profile of individuals whom they want to invite to apply for permanent selection in the province, according to its needs.<\/p>\n
But Hero says she is not qualified.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we don\u2019t know what we can do now,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s so disgusting. Change, moving to another city or another province is difficult because we have two kids and a house that we bought. And so it\u2019s for now, yeah, we really, we don\u2019t know what it can do.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013With files from Radia Tidafi, OMNI News<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Demonstrations took place Monday morning in Quebec\u2019s two biggest cities to protest the end of the Quebec experience…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290367,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[49,48,295,66],"class_list":["post-290366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290366"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290366\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}