Adam Tracey is the manager of policy and government relations at the Ontario Association of Architects

‘Idid my undergrad at Mcmaster from 2002 to 2006. The economy was good in 2006. But it still wasn’t the kind of world where you could just walk out and a job was waiting for you. So I was off from December and working odd jobs through the spring and thought, OK, this is not really turning up too much. So I signed up to do a graduate degree at the University of Ottawa from 2007 to 2009. The wheels kind of fell off everything right as I was finishing that second degree.

“I ended up getting a temp job with the federal government in December 2009. But instead of getting paid whatever I should have been getting paid, you know, $ 30 an hour, I started out on that first contract making $10.25. They ended up hiring me onto a contract and then I was kicked right back out the door again. So I went back into the temp agencies and I ended up working a couple of temp contracts. And each one was the equivalent of a step up on the ladder.

“I applied to countless federal jobs and competitions and pools and everything else and I ended up getting pulled from a pool into a federal contract. So I had gone from temp to an actual federal contract then a bunch of temp jobs back into a federal contract. But three weeks in, the person I was filling in for decided they didn’t like where they had gone, so they were going to come back. So my manager sat me down and said, ‘ This is really terrible. But they have the ability to do that. I can’t stop them.’

“It always felt like I was working towards something, but as soon as I got close, the rug was pulled out from under my feet. So after a couple of years of that, that was the end of the road for me. It hadn’t been my dream to go work for the federal government, but at the time we were in Ottawa, and it’s the biggest employer. It seemed like good stable work. I found out differently. So we ended up moving to Toronto.

“I had co-workers at that time who were in this kind of cycle for longer than I was. And, there are people who certainly suffered a lot worse. But four years of uncertainty with two degrees’ worth of debt and rent prices starting to tick up is not a great way to live. It’s certainly not your vision as you graduate. You really think it’s going to be some kind of a land of opportunity as long as you’re willing to work at it. And I find that’s really not the case these days, not for a lot of people anyway.

“I did the calculation, that you probably shouldn’t do, about how much rent I’ve paid in my lifetime and I feel like it’s like hundreds of thousands of dollars. And you’re just kind of stuck in that. My workplace now doesn’t have a pension. We’ve got an RRSP matching thing. And we basically have whatever we paid into it. Whatever we made was obliterated a couple of years ago. And then it was obliterated again this year. I’ve been contributing to this stuff now for a decade. And I’m really no farther ahead.

“So in some ways, we’ve already been through this. This isn’t a new thing. So it doesn’t keep me up at night. I’m not wringing my hands about it, but it doesn’t make me feel good going asleep either, I’ll put it that way. It’s like a game of Snakes and Ladders. Just as you finally start feeling good about something, you’re right back down to zero. That just seems to be the cycle.”