Question Period Note: Employment and Skills Support for Canada’s Youth

How the Government of Canada is supporting youth to gain the skills and experience they need to successfully enter the labour market.

•Youth are worried about affordability. About 30% of 15 to 24 years old reported difficulty making ends meet.
•Good jobs open a world of possibilities for a better future.
•The Government is on track to deliver on its mandate commitment to continue scaling up youth and student skills and employment programming.
•To help them better prepare for success at work, in 2022-2023, we created almost 190,000 opportunities through the Youth Employment and Skills Strategy Program, Canada Summer Jobs and the Student Work Placement Program.
•The 2022 Fall Economic Statement allocated $701.9M over three years for the Youth Employment and Skills Strategy Program and Canada Summer Jobs.
•Budget 2023 committed $197.7 million in 2024-2025 to continue support for the Student Work Placement Program to create quality work-integrated learning opportunities.
•Through 2023-2024 and 2024-2025, the Government will support 260,000 opportunities through these programs.
•An investment in our youth is a down payment on Canada’s future.

•The Government has a mandate commitment to continue scaling up youth and student skills and employment programming and initiatives for Canadian youth. The main levers to deliver on this commitment are the Youth Employment and Skills Strategy, which includes the YESS Program and Canada Summer Jobs; and the Student Work Placement Program.
•Youth faced the greatest job loss during the pandemic. The overall unemployment rate for youth aged 15-24 peaked at 30% in May 2020. In response, the Government made historic investments to Canada’s Youth Employment and Skills Strategy to help youth, especially those facing barriers, to find and maintain good jobs.
•The Canadian economy is doing well in many ways post pandemic. While the unemployment rate reached a new historical low of 5.0% in 2023 Q1 (rising to 5.2% in 2023 Q2 as labour market tightness eased), and youth unemployment rate is closer to the pre-pandemic average at 10.9% (August 2022 to July 2023), they still experience a doubling of the unemployment rate compared to the general population. A trend which has persisted for the past year.
•Many youth continue to need support, including those from under-represented groups (e.g. youth with disabilities, Indigenous youth, Black and other racialized youth groups, etc.). For example:
o In July 2023, the unemployment rate for Black youth aged 15-24 was 15.9% .
o In July 2023, the unemployment rate for visible minority youth aged 15-24 was 14.7%.
o In December 2022, the unemployment rate for Indigenous youth aged 15-24 was 12.2% compared to 10% for non-Indigenous youth.
•According to a StatsCan Survey from March 30, 2023, about 30% of 15 to 24 years old reported difficulty making ends meet.

Youth Employment and Skills Strategy (YESS)
•The Youth Employment and Skills Strategy (YESS) is a horizontal initiative delivered in partnership by 12 federal departments, agencies and Crown corporations. It supports youth between the ages of 15 and 30 to gain the work experience and develop the skills they need to successfully transition into the labour market. It includes:
o The YESS Program focuses on those further from opportunity including those who are not in education, employment or training (NEET), underrepresented and disadvantaged youth. It supports a flexible approach that offers services tailored to each individual to help youth gain the skills and experience that they need to get and keep good quality jobs. Supports can include mentorship, skills development and training, wrap-around supports (e.g., dependent care support, mental health counselling) and paid work experiences.
o Canada Summer Jobs (CSJ), delivered solely by Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC). It provides wage subsidies to employers from not-for-profit organizations, the public sector, and private sector organizations with 50 or fewer full-time employees. The program helps create quality summer employment opportunities for young Canadians.
•To advance the mandate commitment to create a stream for youth with disabilities under the YESS, stakeholder engagement was held in fall 2022. The Minister for Women and Gender Equality (WAGE) and Youth and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of WAGE met with youth with disabilities, youth service providers and employers. Their advice will be put into action in the Call for Proposals ESDC will be launching for the YESS Program, in Fall 2023.
•In 2022-2023, the YESS Program supported over 26,000 opportunities and CSJ supported over 112,000 jobs.
•The Government’s investment is delivering results for youth. For example, a mid-cycle assessment found that April 2020 to December 2022, 81% of ESDC YESS Program participants had returned to school or were in employment after participation.
•The 2022 Fall Economic Statement allocated $802.1 million over 3 years starting in 2022-23 for the YESS:
o $301.4 million over two years, starting in 2023-24, through the Youth Employment and Skills Strategy Program;
o $400.5 million over two years, starting in 2023-2024, to Canada Summer Jobs to support a total of approximately 70,000 annual summer job placements; and,
o $100.2 million over three years, starting in 2022-2023, to continue supporting work placements for First Nations youth through the Income Assistance-First Nations Youth Employment Strategy Pilot.
•In 2023-2024 and 2024-2025, the YESS Program will create 40,000 opportunities and CSJ will support 140,000 opportunities.

Student Work Placement Program
Investment
•Budget 2023 provides $197.7 million in 2024-25 to the Student Work Placement (SWP) Program to continue creating quality work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunities for students through partnerships between employers and post-secondary education institutions.
•Between 2023-24 and 2024-25, the Program will support the creation of approximately 80,000 work-integrated learning opportunities for post-secondary students across various in-demand sectors.
•These measures will help students can gain the necessary skills, education, and real-life work experience to transition successfully into the workforce.

Results
•Launched in 2017-2018 as a small-scale pilot, the SWP Program has grown from offering 10,000 work-integrated learning opportunities over four years, to over 50,000 in 2022-2023.
•To date, the Program has supported over 190,000 WIL opportunities for postsecondary students across all provinces and territories as well as in all sectors of the Canadian economy. This total includes 138,073 work placements and 64,431 innovative work-integrated learning (I-WIL) opportunities.

Background
•The SWP Program supports partnerships between industry and post-secondary institutions to create quality work placements for students in all disciplines.
•The SWP Program helps post-secondary students to develop work-ready skills, employers to recruit and develop talent, and post-secondary institutions to adapt to changing labour market needs.
•For thousands of Canadian college, university, polytechnic, and CEGEP work integrated learning programs help to bring together academic learning and applied work experience. These work placements can include co-ops, internships or mentorship programs as well as other non-traditional experiences like hackathons, boot camps, and micro-internships.
•The Program incentivizes employers through an enhanced wage subsidy to offer placements to students who have historically lacked access or experience barriers to participating in WIL opportunities. Under the SWP Program, under-represented groups refer to women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, Indigenous Peoples, persons with disabilities, newcomers and visible minorities.
•Under-represented groups may face intersecting barriers when in the workforce and the post-secondary education system. A study of WIL applications in Ontario found a lack of applicants from diverse groups. Only a third of WIL applicants identified as racialized (32.2%), a quarter (25.1%) identified as women, 9.3% of applicants identified as newcomers to Canada, 4.3% identified having a disability, and a very small minority, 0.2% of WIL applicants, identified as Indigenous (Toronto Metropolitan University, 2021).

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