Florence Bollet Michel’s score has sat unchanged for months in the database of people looking to settle permanently in Quebec — and it’s about to take a dip.

Bollet Michel is one of thousands of applicants to the province’s new economic immigration pathway, the Skilled Worker Selection Program, or PSTQ, which ranks people on a points-based system that works off evolving government priorities.

At this moment, three digits summarize her entire life and expertise — at least to Quebec’s Immigration Ministry.

Every month, the ministry will select applicants who score highest among those who fit the province’s specific immigration needs, and invite them to apply for permanent selection.

Just under 7,000 people received invitations since December, according to the ministry. But Bollet Michel was not among them.

“Every month, it’s anguish, it’s waiting. I check my emails, we exchange messages with other colleagues who are in the same situation. We hope and then each time it’s disappointment,” she said. “The weeks and months go by, it’s hard every time.”

The mother of four is a social worker who was recruited by Santé Québec about four years ago while living in Europe.

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Younger, more educated applicants would get more points under new Quebec immigration program

The province has unveiled more details about Programme de sélection des travailleurs qualifiés (PSTQ), a points-based pathway to permanent residency that is set to replace the controversially scrapped Programme de l’expérience québécoise (PEQ).

Despite having over 15 years of experience in a job that Quebec considers to be lacking in the province, there are a number of factors that work against Bollet Michel reaching the maximum score of 1,400. Her score is currently 611.

She’s 46, lives in Montreal and is married — components of her life for which she is penalized by the PSTQ’s scoring system.

In April, her validated job offer will expire, which will set her back another 30 points. Renewals take months and are initiated by the employer at a fee.

“For those who are waiting like me, I can tell you that there is no predictability and we really feel like they’re playing with our lives like in the lottery,” she said, referring to the minister of immigration’s assertion that the PSTQ is not that — a lottery.

Strict criteria

In November, Immigration Minister Jean-François Roberge eliminated the Programme de l’expérience québécoise (PEQ) and made the newer and stricter PSTQ the only pathway for economic migrants with their eyes on Quebec.

The PSTQ essentially exists so that Quebec can prioritize the best candidates in key sectors — education, health care, child care and manufacturing — and drive more immigration to the regions, Roberge says. The PEQ, on the other hand, operated on a first-come, first-served basis and most candidates would end up in Montreal.

The PSTQ is divided into four streams, each with its own criteria to respect: specialized workers, those with intermediate competence and manual skills, regulated professions, and exceptional talent. Applicants who wish to live in Quebec permanently have to submit a declaration of interest through the Arrima platform, and then they’re given a score.

If an applicant receives an invitation, they have 30 days to accept it followed by 60 days to apply for permanent selection, a process that grants a Quebec Selection Certificate (CSQ).

Only once the Immigration Ministry issues that certificate can the applicant finally apply for permanent residence through the federal government.

Immigration lawyer Maxime Lapointe calls the program “granular,” adding that valuable people can be easily overlooked due to the PSTQ’s strict selection criteria.

“The main problem is, you stop earning points after 45 years old, so maybe Quebec [gets] penalized because they don’t take a very good nurse that’s 47 years old, we don’t know,” he said.

He said a better model would be to make the PSTQ complementary to the PEQ. He would also like to see an exemption be put in place for those who arrived in Quebec before the PEQ was abolished and who would have been eligible under the program.

The first CSQs through the PSTQ were delivered in January, the Immigration Ministry said in a statement to CBC News, but it would not confirm how many were issued.

“As the volumes are still small at the moment, we cannot present any data in order to preserve the confidentiality of personal information,” the statement reads.

11th-hour heartbreak

When Bollet Michel was living in Europe, she said the recruiters made it clear to her that they were looking for people with long-term projections in Quebec and that her chances of securing permanent residence through the PEQ were very high.

So when, in 2025, after two years of working in Montreal, she finally became eligible to apply, she was dismayed to see the program had been suspended just hours before on that summer’s day in June.

“[The recruiters] forgot to tell us that the politics could change overnight and that that truth could be completely different in two years,” she said. To her, the new approach holds “many contradictions.”

Santé Québec continues to run recruitment campaigns abroad for “professions in high demand,” a spokesperson, Marianne Paquette, said in a statement.

“Candidates may be informed of existing immigration programs at the time of recruitment,” she said, adding that those “are subject to programs and criteria established by governments and may change over time.”

After Bollet Michel’s rude awakening to the PEQ’s suspension, she got involved with the immigrant advocacy group Le Québec c’est nous aussi, eventually becoming its spokesperson.

Fighting for the so-called “PEQ orphans” through the group has been a great source of motivation to push forward, she said, as there’s little she can do for her score at this point. She’s tied to her employer in Montreal through a closed work permit and simply needs to keep waiting in the hopes that one day, her profile will match who Quebec is looking for.

But she can’t stay in that idle state forever.

“If one day we need to leave Montreal, it’ll be to go to a different province because Quebec has wronged us too much.”

She said New Brunswick’s Health Ministry has already given her phone a ring.