Tourism in Québec has not simply returned to its pre-pandemic state. It has changed structurally, and those changes are measurable. Much of the current conversation around hospitality staffing frames the problem as a talent shortage or an outflow of experienced managers to the United States. When you look at the data, that explanation does not hold. What the numbers show instead is a tourism sector that has grown faster than its leadership capacity, creating role strain that recruitment alone cannot solve.
Before the pandemic, tourism in Québec generated approximately $14.5 billion in annual revenue. That figure collapsed in 2020–2021, reaching roughly $10.2 billion in 2021, according to provincial and federal tourism accounts. During that contraction, a significant portion of experienced hospitality managers left the sector entirely. This matters because those exits were not temporary furloughs; many were permanent career changes.
By 2023, tourism revenue in Québec rebounded to approximately $16 billion, and by 2024 it climbed further to about $16.8 billion, exceeding pre-2019 levels. In other words, Québec is now running more tourism revenue than it did before the pandemic, but with fewer experienced managers than it had five years ago. Demand recovered faster than leadership capacity.
This imbalance is one of the most under-discussed drivers of instability at the General Manager level. Restaurants are handling higher throughput, higher guest expectations, and tighter margins with leaner leadership structures. That is not a cyclical fluctuation; it is a structural shift.
At the same time, the composition of tourism demand has changed in ways that directly affect operations. In 2019, domestic visitors accounted for approximately 62% of tourism activity in Québec, with international visitors making up about 38%. During the pandemic, domestic tourism surged, reaching roughly 70% of total visitation in 2021. While international travel has recovered since then, the balance has not returned to its pre-pandemic state. In 2024, domestic visitors still represented about 66% of total tourism activity, with international visitors accounting for roughly 34%.
This matters operationally because domestic and international guests behave differently. Domestic tourists tend to travel for shorter stays, cluster around weekends and events, and display greater price sensitivity. International visitors are more variable, more seasonal, and often arrive in concentrated waves tied to festivals, conferences, and global travel conditions. The result is demand that is less predictable week to week, even when annual revenue is strong.
Layered on top of this is Québec’s demographic reality. Montréal, which anchors a large share of the province’s tourism spending, has a population in which approximately 38.8% of residents identify as visible minorities. Census data also shows that, beyond French and English, languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Punjabi, Arabic, Spanish, and Hindi are spoken by significant portions of the population at home and at work.
This demographic diversity shows up on the floor. Québec restaurants are increasingly managing multilingual guest interactions and culturally diverse teams, while simultaneously operating under Bill 96, which reinforces French as the default language of work and internal communication. That dual requirement — legal French-first compliance alongside real multilingual operational needs — did not exist at the same scale in 2019.
This is where the talent narrative often goes wrong.
There is no statistical evidence of a mass permanent migration of Québec hospitality talent to the United States. Statistics Canada’s long-term migration data shows that permanent Canada-to-U.S. migration has declined compared to historical peaks in the late 20th century. While some professionals move temporarily under TN visas or short-term contracts, these flows are limited in scale and not concentrated in hospitality leadership.
What has changed is sector retention. Workforce data across hospitality shows elevated attrition at the management level since 2021, not because managers are leaving Québec, but because they are leaving frontline GM roles altogether. Many move into adjacent sectors such as facilities management, real estate operations, logistics, or consulting. Others remain in hospitality but avoid unit-level GM positions.
This distinction matters. The data does not support a geography problem. It supports a role-design problem.
Between 2019 and 2024, the GM role in Québec absorbed additional responsibility without a corresponding redesign. Compliance obligations expanded. Guest language complexity increased. Demand became more compressed around events and tourism peaks. Yet in many organizations, compensation bands, staffing depth, and decision authority remained anchored to pre-pandemic assumptions.
When managers exit under these conditions, the departure is often misinterpreted as a recruiting failure or competitive poaching. In reality, it is frequently a rational response to a role whose scope has expanded faster than its structural support.
Québec’s situation is also not easily comparable to other provinces. Ontario does not operate under the same language regime. Alberta’s tourism demand is more predictable and less linguistically complex. Québec uniquely combines statutory language enforcement, multicultural urban tourism, and post-pandemic leadership thinning. Applying management models from elsewhere without adjustment produces predictable turnover.
The numbers point to a clear conclusion. Tourism in Québec is larger, more complex, and more demanding than it was five years ago. Leadership capacity has not scaled at the same pace. The perception that talent is “leaving for the U.S.” is not supported by migration data. What is happening instead is that experienced managers are opting out of roles that no longer reflect the realities of the operating environment.
Until General Manager roles are recalibrated to match the measurable changes in tourism revenue, visitor composition, and workforce diversity, recruitment pressure will persist regardless of how aggressively operators hire. This is not an opinion. It is the logical outcome of the data.