CTV Montreal | 3 August 2018
A restaurant owner in Quebec City says he’s had to search as far as Mexico to find workers to address the province’s labour shortage.
Quebec’s unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been in 40 years, and with 90,000 jobs available, there’s fierce competition to recruit.
“2017 was like the perfect storm. We’ve never had so many tourists in Quebec and there was just nobody to work in the kitchen. The only way we stayed open was we had very good rapport with former employees who would come back and give us one day here and one day there,” said restaurateur Kevin Quinn. “We got through it and at the end of that year we decided ‘Okay, we’re not doing this anymore. We’re going to find another solution.’ And our solution was to hire foreign workers.”
Quinn turned to Mexico to find six temporary workers to help out in his kitchen this summer at the Nouvelle-France restaurant in Old Quebec.