Québec Cityculture & etiquette

Around 95% of the metropolitan area speaks French as a first language, and outside the tourist blocks of Vieux-Québec and the university, English is genuinely limited. Your landlord, your pharmacist, your child's school, your employer's HR system and every piece of government correspondence will be in French. People are welcoming about a foreigner's imperfect French and much less able to switch to English than in Montreal — not out of principle, but because many simply do not speak it. Arrive at a conversational level or arrive knowing that your first year is a language course.

For most economic immigration you need a Certificat de sélection du Québec before Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada will process permanent residence. Quebec replaced its skilled-worker selection program in late 2024 with a new set of streams built around a hard spoken-French requirement rather than a points bonus. Planning a move here on advice written about Express Entry for Toronto or Vancouver is the most expensive mistake newcomers make, and it is entirely avoidable.

Québec City averages about 300 cm of snow a season — more than Montreal, more than almost any city of its size on earth. The upside is that the clearing operation is formidable and life does not stop. The obligation is yours: winter tyres are required by law from 1 December to 15 March, the orange déneigement signs mean your car is towed if you leave it, and the Haute-Ville hills in freezing rain are the actual hazard, not the cold. Boots with real grip before your first storm, not after.

Quebec is the only province that administers its own income tax. Every year you file a federal return with the Canada Revenue Agency and a separate provincial return with Revenu Québec, whose head office is in this city. Certified software handles both from one set of inputs, but you get two of every slip, two deadlines and two sets of correspondence — and every piece of general Canadian tax advice quietly assumes one return.

Québec City runs one of the lowest unemployment rates of any large Canadian city, year after year. Employers in health, construction, hospitality, insurance and the trades are genuinely short of people, so a candidate who can work in French is in a strong position. The catch is that the shortage is in French-language roles; the pool of jobs that can be done in English here is small and concentrated in a handful of tech and research employers.

Average rents here are well below Montreal's and roughly half of Toronto's. They are also chased by a vacancy rate that has sat near or under 1% for several years, so the constraint is availability rather than price. The Quebec cycle applies — most leases run 1 July to 30 June and the market clears in spring — and the strongest single move is to take over an existing lease by assignment rather than compete for a new listing.