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OK, so barbers and hairdressers are retiring in appreciable numbers and salons are having trouble finding replacements. Is this really a job for the premier? Or even the ministry? Not if you have a well-functioning labour market, and there’s no reason, in a nominally capitalist society, that we shouldn’t have. What’s a price system for? If there are shortages, employers need to look harder for workers. (In the Emploi-Québec study, 13 per cent of employers said they did.) They may even have to offer higher wages (though only 12 per cent said they did that).

It is nice to see the premier focused on real problems

Emploi-Québec has a handy website with detailed descriptions of hundreds of different jobs. Helpful information for would-be barbers includes: “Work activities are performed near the worker… Colour discrimination is relevant in the performance of the work… Work activities involve co-ordination of upper limbs … (and) … handling loads up to 5 kg.” The main page for barbers indicates that a two- or three-year junior college program is often required but that, uncharacteristically for Quebec, which insists on credentials for almost everything else, “trade certification for hairstylists” is voluntary. Employers having trouble finding recruits could relax the requirements. In provinces where certification is mandatory — Nova Scotia, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta — governments could reduce any shortages by doing the same.

By contrast, the premier makes it sound as if salon operators, instead of being entrepreneurial and taking action to solve their own staffing problems, should run first to the new regional office of Immigration, Diversity and Inclusion and arrange for the immigration of hairstylists from other French-speaking areas of the world (Berber barbers?) and their assimilation into rural Quebec, where the demographic decline is most precipitous and, so far, the resistance to people with unfamiliar habits most acute.