Not long ago, the few African immigrants in Rouyn-Noranda, a remote town in northern Quebec, all knew each other.
There was the Nigerian woman long married to a man from Cebu. The curious researchers from Cameroon or the Ivory Coast. And, of course, the doyen, a Congolese chemist who first made a name for himself driving a Zamboni to hockey games.
Today, newcomers from Africa are everywhere — on the streets, in supermarkets, in factories, in hotels, even in the boxing club in the basement of the church.
A couple from Benin have taken over Chez Morasse, a city institution that introduced a beloved spoon, poutine, to this region. And women from many corners of West and Central Africa chatted at the city’s new African grocer, Épicerie Interculturelle.
“Since last year, it’s like the gate of hell or the gate of heaven, something opened and everyone kept coming in – I’ve never seen so many Africans in my life,” Folake Loanson Savard, 51, the Nigerian whose husband is Québécois , he said with loud laughs in the store.
Rouyn-Noranda’s transformation followed the wave of immigrants Canada has allowed in as temporary workers in recent years to address widespread labor shortages. Many were able to eventually convert their temporary status to permanent residency, the final step before acquiring citizenship.
The influx of immigrants has also raised concerns, contributing to the nation’s housing crisis and straining public services in some areas, leading Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to announce plans to limit their numbers.
The increase has created African communities in the most unlikely places in the French-speaking province of Quebec. Some work in logging in northern forests. Others, after becoming permanent residents or citizens, are government employees in native towns accessible only by boat or small helicopters.
While African immigrants have long lived in the big cities of the province, the newcomers are a recent phenomenon in the rural areas.
With a graying population and declining birth rate, a labor shortage has drawn many from French-speaking Africa to Quebec, including Rouyn-Noranda, a mining town of 42,000 about 90 minutes north of Montreal — by plane.
Across Canada, the number of temporary residents, a category that includes foreign workers as well as foreign students and asylum seekers, has skyrocketed in recent years. It has doubled in just the past two years to 2.7 million, out of Canada’s total population of 41 million.
Canada’s immigration policy has traditionally focused on attracting highly educated and skilled immigrants.
But many temporary foreign workers are now being hired by companies for less-skilled jobs in manufacturing and the service sector, fueling debate about whether they will contribute as much to Canada’s economy as previous immigrants.
Rouyn-Noranda’s once tiny African population consisted of people recruited for technical positions in the mining industry or as researchers at the local university.
“We had teachers and engineers,” said Valentin Brin, the director of La Mosaïque, a private organization that helps young immigrants. “And then there was a shift.”
The change happened in part because of the city government’s decision in 2021 to increase efforts to help local companies hire foreign workers, said Mariève Migneault, director of the Center for Local Development, the city’s economic development arm.
“Our companies suffered from such a lack of workers that it slowed down the economic development of Rouyn-Noranda,” Ms. Migneault said.
For G5, a family-owned company that owns and operates hotels and restaurants in the city, the pool of local workers had been shrinking for years, said Tatiana Gabrysz, who oversees the company’s two hotels. Young people were more attracted to high-paying mining jobs.
The immigrants, most of them from Colombia, are expected to soon make up about 10 percent of the company’s 200-person workforce, Ms. Gabrysz said, adding that they have allowed the company to operate without constantly worrying about staff shortages.
“It changed my life,” Ms. Gabrysz said.
Exact numbers are hard to come by, but Africans are believed to make up the largest group of temporary foreign workers in the city. Some 4,000 to 4,500 temporary foreign workers are now in the Rouyn-Noranda region, following a sharp increase from 2021, according to the Center for Local Development.
When Aimé Pingi arrived in the region from the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2008, there were so few Africans that everyone could get to know each other.
“If you spotted one, you’d exchange phone numbers immediately and then call each other to meet for coffee,” Mr Pingi said. “They were like family back then.”
With a degree in chemistry, Mr. Pingi came to work in a mining company. But he also took odd jobs, including operating a Zamboni at hockey games in a town north of Rouyn-Noranda, which attracted a lot of attention and helped him meet people.
“People were curious, in a good way,” he said. “They wanted to know what I was doing here, what brought me here.”
Mr. Pingi eventually married a local woman and even ran — unsuccessfully — for local office.
Today, temporary workers from Africa often arrive as part of a “family project,” said Mohamed Méité, a member of La Mosaïque from the Ivory Coast who is getting a PhD in mining engineering at Rouyn-Noranda.
Supported by their extended families, they usually come to Quebec on two-year contracts with a single employer. If their visas allow, they can apply for permanent residence after the contracts expire and sponsor their families to join Canada.
Because many temporary workers are initially tied to a single employer, they can sometimes suffer abuses, including unfair dismissals and low wages, said La Mosaïque’s Mr. Brin.
Even if working conditions are good, being isolated in remote parts of Quebec and separated from their families comes at a heavy price, some African migrants said.
A Cameroonian, Metangmo Nji, 40, left her husband and children in 2022 to work as a cook in a fast food chain in Rouyn-Noranda. Although her employer treated her and four other Cameroonian kitchen workers well, even providing accommodation, Ms Nji said that alone led to “severe depression”.
“Leaving my family and my children behind is the hardest thing I’ve ever been through,” she said.
Temporary workers, he said, need to be “psychologically strong” to cope with loneliness as they look forward to being able to obtain residency and call their families.
However, things had improved, Ms Nji said. With Rouen-Noranda’s African population growing rapidly, an association for Cameroonians now has 52 members, up from 10 last year, he said. They meet once a month for Cameroonian dishes such as fufu with ndolé, a spinach stew.
The growing presence of the African community was perhaps most keenly felt when the city’s most famous restaurant, Chez Morasse, passed two years ago into the hands of Carlos Sodji and Sylviane Senou, a young couple from Benin.
Poutine—the calorific combination of French fries layered with cheese curds and gravy—has become Quebec’s signature dish worldwide.
But it was introduced to the Rouyn-Noranda region in the 1970s after the Morasse family discovered it elsewhere in Quebec, said Christian Morasse, the restaurant’s former owner. Generations have grown up with wolf at Chez Morasse, cementing its place in the city’s history and culture.
When Mr. Morasse decided to retire in 2022, he considered several buyout offers. Brushing aside offers from the Québécois in favor of the West African pair, Mr. Morasse said Mr. Sodji had worked with him as a distributor and had the “soul of an entrepreneur.”
As a permanent resident, Mr Morasse said he had also seen how African newcomers had revitalized his town.
“Due to the lack of labor, our supermarkets were almost closed on weekends and our restaurants were closed two, three days a week and in the evenings,” he said. “Now they are open and they are all African workers.”
Chez Morasse’s staff includes six cooks recently arrived from Benin and Togo.
To the surprise of Mr. Sodji and Ms. Senou, the purchase of Chez Morasse attracted media attention. “A new era begins at Chez Morasse,” said Radio-Canada, the public broadcaster. The Globe and Mail described how “Benin immigrants saved the famous poutine in a Quebec city” and the newspaper Le Devoir simply said “the best poutine in the world is now Beninois”.
“We didn’t expect such a reaction,” Ms. Senou said. “But we really didn’t have time to enjoy it or think about it. We were very busy with work.”
