Mr. Baines is the face of a generation that is being forced to make life adjustments after a recession that claimed hundreds of thousands of jobs, devastating a labour market now struggling to rebound.Read all of Tavia Grant's article.
No group has been displaced more than our youth, whose jobless rate has spiked to a near 11-year high of 15.6 per cent. And as more young people move home, default on their debts and scuttle their career plans, the aftershocks will linger for years, economists warn. Nowhere has the youth jobless toll risen more, percentage-wise, than in British Columbia, where it rocketed 56.2 per cent to 60,000 this October from the same month last year.
Economists hold out hope that when Statistics Canada releases its latest reading on the labour force Friday, some new jobs will have been created nationally. But even if the report shows some improvements among youth, that would be small comfort to the 438,000 young Canadians now looking for jobs. And many young people say that if the picture is brightening, they aren't seeing it.
“If this economy doesn't pick up again, we're going to lose this generation,” says Nancy Schaefer, who runs Toronto-based Youth Employment Services (YES) , one of the largest youth jobless centres in the country. “They're going to lose hope.”
The situation is particularly acute among recent university graduates, say youth employment counsellors. Caught between being overqualified and rejected for low-skilled jobs, and competing with out-of-work, more experienced older workers for higher-skilled positions, many are struggling with rising living costs and debt loads, they say.
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Often when I criticize Canadian immigration policy, I'm told Canada has always had immigration and people have always complained about it. In other words, what's the big deal? The big deal is this. The immigration policy we have today is radically different from the one we used to have.
Although Canadians often associate Pierre Elliot Trudeau with immigration because his government introduced official multiculturalism, the big change I want to talk about came under Brian Mulroney. Before Mulroney's Conservatives came to power, immigration levels would rise and fall in accordance with Canada's labour needs. When the economy was booming immigration levels would rise and when unemployment went up immigration targets would go down.
This sensible practice of adjusting immigration levels according to our country's labour needs ended when Mulroney's immigration minister Barbara McDougall convinced the cabinet to increase immigration to 250,000 newcomers a year. More important than that, from now on this number would either remain steady or rise regardless of the state of the Canadian economy.
Mulroney's Conservatives changed immigration policy because they wanted to woo ethnic voters away from the Liberals. This policy of ethnic pandering has continued under Stephen Harper.
See also:
Australia and UK admit unemployment-immigration connection. Canada says nothing
Is there Really a Looming Labour Shortage in Canada and, if there is, can Increased Immigration Fill the Gap?
Gov't Ignored Predictions That High Immigration Would Lower Income Growth. Canadians Have Paid The Price
Auditor General: 370,000 temporary foreign workers and other immigration problems
