Quebec Incomes Have Jumped An 'Unprecedented' Amount — Here's Where They Were Highest
Hint: not Montreal, Quebec City or Gatineau.
Canadian $100 banknotes.
Quebecers are making more money. In a February 23 release, the province's Institut de la statistique noted an "unprecedented" increase in the median Quebec employment income in 2021: 9% among 24-to-60-year-olds compared to just 1.8% in 2020.
That brought the median provincewide income to $49,788 in 2021.
The 9% jump outpaced the average annual increase in consumer prices, which Statistics Canada put at 3.8% in Quebec in the same year.
Some areas of the province saw an even greater increase in median employment income. 48 Quebec MRCs (municipalité régionale de comté; groupings of municipalities that share services) had an increase that was above the provincial median, the institute says. The greatest increase among MRCs, 18.3%, was in the Golfe-du-Saint-Laurent in the Côte-Nord region.
But, according to the institute, many of the MRCs with the highest 2021 median incomes surround the province's largest cities. They include Les Collines-de-l'Outaouais north of Gatineau ($66,488), La Jacques-Cartier north of Quebec City ($63,372), and La Vallée-du-Richelieu ($62,772) and Marguerite-D'Youville ($61,426) east of Montreal.
In Montreal itself, the median income was $46,725 in 2021. It was 53,652 in Quebec City and $59,250 in Gatineau.
The highest 2021 median employment income in the province, $90,171, was in the Côte-Nord region's Caniapiscau MRC, where mining dominates the economy.
The Institut de la satistique otherwise recorded a 4.3% increase in the portion of the labour force between the ages of 24 and 60 in 2021. But just 41 of the province's 104 MRCs saw the number of workers return to or exceed 2019 levels, the organization said.
