Processual Analysis of Foreign-Trained Professionals Admission into Regulated Professions in Quebec: What Role Has the Pandemic Crisis Played in Implementing Long Awaited Transformations?

This paper proposes an analysis of professional regulation during the covid period, looking particularly at admission of foreign-trained professionals (FTPs) in the province of Quebec (Canada). Through web-scraping techniques, we collected data on media presence of Quebec’s professional regulators during the first 18 months of the pandemic crisis period (March 2020 to November 2021). Preliminary data analysis shows a total of 3795 occurrences. Further analysis will discriminate between covid-related publications or all other themes. Admission of foreign-trained professionals (FTPs) being a recurrent theme among regulated professions’ ecologies (Abbott, 2005) in Quebec, the analysis will show how these ecologies reacted on that matter during the pandemic crisis. One of its main objectives is to show how the crisis context helped in treating some long-lasting issues. With hindsight, other related events show that this theme (FTP admission) is sometimes treated through other, related measures. For example, echoing similar experiences in other Canadian provinces, creation of an assistant-doctor position seems to answer some of the issues raised during the crisis context. Current propositions to change the Professional Code, Quebec’s overarching law on regulated professions, aim to answer long-lasting issues (lighter regulatory activity, being more responsive to ongoing challenges) with important input from the pandemic crisis. With a neo-institutionalist approach (Powell & Bromley, 2015) we will first focus on results from the health professions during the pandemic crisis and enrich this analysis with more recent developments on relevant issues regarding admission of FTPs. This latter, related analysis draws from documentary analysis from 2017 up to Spring 2025.