Jobs for young workers a priority: HR minister

Jobless rate about 14% for those aged under 25

In the face of an unrelenting level of youth unemployment in this country, Human Resources Minister Diane Finley has said she plans to look at potential changes to the programs targeting unemployed young Canadians.

“There is no silver bullet,” Finley said from Mexico, where she was meeting with her G20 counterparts.

“When we get back to Canada, we’re going to be looking in more depth at the ideas we’ve heard here.”

Last week, Statistics Canada released its latest labour report. It found 58,000 new jobs in the country, most of them full time. More people were also looking for work, which is why the unemployment rate crept up 0.1 per cent to 7.3 per cent.

But the unemployment rate remained unchanged for one age group. At 13.9 per cent, unemployment for youth — defined as those under the age of 25 — remains little changed since July 2009, according to Statistics Canada.

Finley, who oversees Canada’s employment programs, said the challenges for this age group include the availability of work and matching training programs to the skills required in the workforce.

After almost three years of a steady unemployment rate, though, Finley acknowledged the situation won’t change quickly.

Finley said the government needs to look at programs to match training with the skills employers require, saying there is currently a mismatch between what young employees can do and what employers need.

She also said the department will have to work on providing young workers with better labour- market and job information.

One thing the department won’t be looking at, she said, is whether to provide incentives to Canadians on Employment Insurance to move to another part of the country to find work, which was part of a Human Resources and Skills Development study by Sage Research Corp.

“That was something that the department did as part of their routine research,” Finley said.

“That’s not something that we’ve been contemplating.”

Statistics Canada’s job numbers show that since July 2009, the country has created about 750,000 net new jobs. However, during that time frame, youth accounted for more than half of all net job losses, according to a March 2012 report from TD Economics. The report’s author, Francis Fong, noted that youth employment still stands about 250,000 below its pre- recession peak, while the job number for those 25 and over is more than 400,000 above its level before the downturn.

“The economic recovery has been almost non- existent for younger Canadians,” Fong wrote.

The report went on to note that, while the numbers appear bad, Canadian youth have come through the recession in better condition than their counterparts in some other countries, notably Greece, Spain or Ireland. In those places, unemployment has reached as high as 51 per cent, and youths face significant problems getting into the workforce and finding jobs as more older workers stay on the job longer.

The federal government added $ 50 million in spending over two years to its youth- employment strategy in the 2012 budget. The money is designed to “help more young Canadians get the information and gain the skills, work experience and abilities they need to make a successful transition to the workplace,” according to budget documents.