Ottawa / Montreal (Reuters) - The town of Hérouxville, a small town in Quebec, Canada, made headlines 15 years ago when it issued a code of conduct for immigrants warning them against stoning women or burning them alive and merely covering their faces on Halloween. Fast forward to 2022.

It is now actively working to attract newcomers. The deep-seated fear of the city council regarding the assimilation of immigrants at the expense of Quebec’s French-speaking identity has given way to a more urgent concern: the need for more families to help fill jobs, enroll in schools, and maintain its population. Bernard Thompson, mayor of the town of 1,300 people in central Quebec, said: "A new family, no matter where they are from, if we can welcome them here, we are happy to do so."

"The needs are huge in rural areas." Hérouxville’s outreach is a response to a broader dilemma facing Quebec, Canada, and many other countries to varying degrees, where governments from London and Washington to Canberra and Tokyo balance the public and political pressure to limit immigration against the crippling labor shortages.

An aging population, increasing numbers of retiring workers, travel and business disruptions caused by the coronavirus are among the factors contributing to a staff crisis hitting both low-wage and skilled professions, from hospitality and manufacturing to transportation and agriculture.

Canada has the worst labor shortage in the Western world according to the latest data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development from late 2021. Its plight has been exacerbated by a record wave of retirements this year. The problem is particularly severe in rural Quebec and is often overlooked by the limited group of newcomers who prefer to reside in Montreal.

The statistics issued by Statistics Canada on Wednesday showed that immigrants now make up 23% of Canada’s population, up from 21.9% in 2016, with newcomers accounting for 80% of the country’s workforce growth over the past five years. The statistics also paint a picture of a decline in urban areas where more than 90% of new immigrants live in a city, leaving small towns and rural areas struggling to attract newcomers to replace aging factory workers, grocery clerks, and doctors. The French-speaking province, which has extensive control over its immigration policy, is experiencing change more than anywhere else in Canada.

The new data showed that only 14.6% of its 8.3 million population were born abroad, much lower than the national average. The Avenir coalition government in Quebec was re-elected this month pledging to cap permanent arrivals at 50,000 annually to protect the region’s language and culture. Immigration has remained steady at this level for years, even as immigration in Canada rose by 49% since the Liberal Trudeau party took office in late 2015.

"A reflection of torn local sentiments," Quebec Premier François Legault described immigrants as a source of wealth, although he also said allowing more people in without ensuring they speak French would be "suicidal." But Legault extended an olive branch to immigrants last week, forming a government that included a multilingual immigration minister and a black minister to fight racism.

Statistics Canada reported that Quebec had 246,300 job vacancies as of July 2022 and only 185,100 unemployed. The labor gap is particularly large in manufacturing, where the regional industry association estimates that the staff shortage has cost them 18 billion Canadian dollars (13 billion dollars) within two years.

Jamie Jean, chief economist at financial services company Desjardins Group in Montreal, said: "Our labor participation is under more pressure than anywhere else because we don’t see foreign workers replacing retirees." Jean said he expects Quebec’s government to face pressure from businesses to raise the immigration ceiling, adding that the province risks being economically overtaken by neighboring Ontario and other large provinces like Alberta and British Columbia.

Rural cities in Quebec feel the pain especially because they have much less appeal for immigrants than Montreal, the province’s largest city which itself faces a severe labor shortage. That is why local authorities take it upon themselves to roll out the red carpet for newcomers in places like Hérouxville, which long abandoned its immigrant code of conduct.

Mayor Thompson said the code, unanimously approved by the city council in 2007, was archived by the council running since 2009 in 2010. He added: "It wasn’t a legal document... and is now a historical document. It has been a long time since the citizens and my city put this issue aside." In fact, the surrounding Mauricie region itself has launched into wooing immigrants.

The villages formed committees tasked with helping newcomers find everything from housing to halal food. In the nearby Shawinigan area with 50,000 residents, immigrants are encouraged to take trips to lumberjack villages and try activities like curling and send their children to summer camp to experience Canadian wildlife, another campaign placed faces of immigrants on buses in the town of Saint-Tite.

Walid Kassemi works at metal works company Acier Rayco after moving to Canada with his wife just before the pandemic. While many of his Algerian friends prefer bustling Montreal, Kassemi likes the opportunities he found in Saint-Tite, a town known for its annual Western festival.

Kassemi said: "Here they give people a chance: they train them and invest in human resources." Eric Saint-Laurent, president of Acier Rayco, said he had enough work to hire six more people and is happy to take qualified immigrants to fill open roles even if they don’t speak French initially. "It’s not a big problem for us." Quebec seems to have had some success promoting French speakers through immigration caps.

New census data showed that 28.7% of new immigrants to the province speak French as a first language, up from 25.7% in 2016. But most newcomers in the province still report a foreign language as their mother tongue.

Eva Marie Naji Cloutier, human resources coordinator at snow-blowing machine maker Les Machineries Pronovost in Saint-Tite, exhibits the same linguistic flexibility but said newcomers need support. She said that when the company's workers had to isolate after arriving from Tunisia during COVID-19, people in the town rallied to help with supplies.

A temporary fix amid mounting factory jobs, Quebec manufacturers argue the province needs to follow the lead of other provinces and expand its intake of skilled permanent residents. Since new permanent immigration has essentially remained stable since 2015, the province has relied on temporary foreign workers to fill vacancies, with these permits increasing by 163.9% during the same period.

Many employers now find themselves relying on this temporary labor. "Help Wanted" signs are spread across stores and restaurants in towns and villages of Quebec’s western Ottawa region. Manuella Teixeira, who moved to Canada from Portugal as a child and now runs six businesses in the Old Chelsea resort town, said she has hired 11 temporary workers in Morocco months ago but is still waiting on papers for eight of them. She said it is hard to fill service jobs, especially after COVID shutdowns led many workers to move to other industries, not work that can be automated. "The French language needs to be protected as it is part of the country’s wealth." "But I don’t think we should be afraid of people coming from abroad."

Editing: Yusra Bamtaraff