Federal government affirms funding for youth employment

Federal Ministers Pablo Rodriguez and Marie-claude Bibeau were at the offices of Actions Interculturelles in Sherbrooke on Tuesday morning to announce investments of nearly $5.9 million that have been made over the last three years to help young people access the job market.

“These are programs to help our youth,” said Rodriguez, the Minister of Canadian Heritage and Multiculturalism, speaking on behalf of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour Minister Patty Hajdu. “It is really to break the cycle of; you have no experience so you can’t get a job, but without a job you can’t get any experience.”

Rodriguez, who came to Canada at age eight as a refugee from Argentina and grew up in Sherbrooke, praised the work of Actions Interculturelles in helping to integrate immigrants and newcomers into the workplace, arguing that having a reliable job is a key component

to settling in and becoming a part of a new community and culture. He noted that youth retention, already a challenge in rural communities, is even more difficult in smaller cultural groups and that any effort to break down those added barriers is a big help.

“Often all these people need is a first chance,” the minister said.

Louise Gagné, chair of Actions Interculturelles’ Board of Directors, explained that the funding announced Tuesday is in part to fund programs that have already been carried out, but also to fund ongoing extensions of that work. As a result of the funding the organization, was able to open offices in Ottawa and Sudbury to supplement the work already being done in Sherbrooke.

Funding is being provided to Actions interculturelles under the Skills Link and Career Focus programs, which are part of the Youth Employment Strategy.

Skills Link supports projects that help young people who face more barriers to employment than others get employability skills and gain job experience, which in turn helps them make a successful transition into the workforce or go back to school. This could include youth who have not completed high school, single parents, Indigenous youth, youth with disabilities, newcomers or youth living in rural or remote areas.

Career Focus supports projects that help high school graduates transition to the labour market through paid internships, and helps to provide them with the information and experience they need to make informed career decisions, find a job and/or pursue post-secondary studies.

Bibeau shared that, to date, 473 youth have been able to benefit from the initiatives.

“It stated out with one project and then there was a second, a third, and now we’ve gotten to the sixth,” she said. “It is a great success here in Sherbrooke which is now spreading to Ontario.”

Speaking more broadly of the federal Youth Employment Strategy as a whole, Bibeau said that 250 young people in the Compton-stanstead riding were able to benefit from more than 650,000 in grants given to 171 different local organizations, municipalities, and small businesses last summer alone.