Legault and Trudeau to meet on immigration next week

Premier François Legault will meet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday, June 10, in Quebec City to discuss immigration.

Legault is asking the federal government to better distribute asylum seekers throughout the rest of the country.

He also wants Quebec to have a say in the selection of temporary foreign workers, and for French language skills to be taken into account.

The Legault government is also asking Ottawa for $1 billion to pay for asylum seekers.

“We expect the federal government to have heard our demands. We want significant and meaningful answers that will generate changes to all the requests we have,” Immigration Minister Christine Fréchette told a press scrum at the National Assembly on Wednesday.

The pair previously met on March 15 to discuss the topic.

Legault wanted to have full powers on immigration, but Trudeau refused. This request no longer seems to be a priority for the CAQ government.

Quebec’s premier keeps hammering home the fact that his province has 560,000 temporary immigrants, and that this is putting pressure on public services.

After threatening to hold a referendum on immigration, Legault seems to have put this option on the back burner.

According to him, 65 per cent of Quebecers are in favour of the province having more power over immigration. “So the problem isn’t getting the support of Quebecers, it’s making it an emergency and convincing the federal government to act now,” he said on 98.5 FM Tuesday.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews