Regional Employment Profiles: PERT’s Regional Tour

Consultations

The Provincial Employment Roundtable (PERT) is always looking to deepen our understanding of the employment landscape for English-speaking Québecers. This summer we set out to meet with Québec’s English-language employment service providers to learn about the realities they face on the ground.

Over the summer, the PERT team organized a virtual tour of Québec’s administrative regions in order to meet the stakeholders in the English-speaking communities located across the province. We met with over 45 community organizations and stakeholders across Québecand gained region-specific insight into the employment realities English-speaking Québecers experience on the ground.

The input and feedback we were able to gather in meeting these groups will feed into a series of profiles on the state of employment and employability for the English-speaking communities across Québec’s 17 administrative regions. Connecting with regional stakeholders plays a vital role in ensuring the accuracy and relevance of our profiles. It will also help us highlight the unique employment issues faced in each community, as well as the universal challenges to employment for English-speaking Québecers across the province.

To build these profiles, we conducted a survey of the available information on employment for the English-speaking population, with the goal of deepening our understanding of the specific employment needs in each region and identifying the priority issues. This survey led us to four datasets:

Statistics Canada’s 2016 census
Statistics Canada’s more recent labour force surveys
Data released by the Institut de la statistique du Québec
The Minister of Economy and Innovation

Of these datasets, the profiles rely more heavily on census data collected in 2016. This is due to the absence of language-specific data within the provincial data sets. Though census data is slightly dated, we see it as valuable for two reasons:

It’s the primary source of data that looks at English and French speakers and surveys them on a wide range of employment-related questions. Data this granular is not always collected at the provincial level so federal data is often the best we have available.
Census data paints an important picture of how the labour market is changing every 5 years. As we are currently in a census year, we will have access to new census data a year and a half from now. This data will act as a useful foundational data set that will be valuable for comparing this profile to the future ones and tracking the evolution of Québec’s employment landscape over time.

As we approach the release date for our Regional Employment profiles, we would like to thank everyone who took the time to meet with us and share the employment realities in each of their communities.