In the early days of the provincial election campaign, Parti Québécois Leader Paul St-Pierre Plamondon used the Roger-Comtois High School in Quebec City as a backdrop to explain why his party wants to reduce immigration levels.
He said the school had to add 24 modular classrooms to deal with overcrowding, blaming the issue on Quebec’s “greatly exceeded” immigration capacity.
Days later, St-Pierre Plamondon made a similar connection, this time between immigration and the housing crisis.
“We are not talking about blaming anyone, but rather about blaming very bad policies under the CAQ, and more specifically, under Christine Fréchette’s CAQ when she was minister of immigration,” he said last week in Quebec City.
He said those policies “created an imbalance between supply and demand and an undeniable impact on prices.”
But is the province’s immigration rate truly behind these problems?
Most of the experts CBC consulted agree that a surge in immigration does contribute to supply and demand issues, but they say it’s important to acknowledge longstanding trends that created these problems.
PQ fact check: Is immigration contributing to Quebec’s housing crisis and school overcrowding?
According to data from Statistics Canada, the number of new immigrants in Quebec climbed under former prime minister Justin Trudeau’s government.
Temporary immigration in particular surged even higher after the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the number of combined permanent and temporary immigration numbers rose by about 54,000. In 2024, it rose by almost 140,000.
According to the Association québécoise du personnel de direction des écoles (AQPDE), a surge in the number of first generation immigrant students has indeed driven school overcrowding in regions like Quebec City and the Montérégie.
“Right now, we’re asking teachers to teach outside instead of going to the gymnasium, we
