Ontario’s Young People Have Been Screwed Enough On the Jobs Front. This Provincial Budget Should Be For Them

A Commentary by Doug Draper

As the legendary New York Yankee baseball player Yogi Berra was once famously quoted to have said; “It is like déjà vu all over again.”

With that in mind, what we’ve got going on in Ontario as of this July 14^th, 2014 is a Liberal government under the leadership of Premier Kathleen Wynne re-introducing the same budget it tabled this past spring. That’s right. The very same budget that triggered a provincial election that lost Tim Hudak his job as the province’s Conservative opposition leader and lost Andrea Horwath whatever influence the NDP had as the party that held the balance of power under a minority Liberal government. 

Now, thanks to Hudak’s total ineptitude as a political campaigner and Horwath triggering a spring election without a strong plan of her own, we have a Liberal majority government that gives Kathleen Wynne and her cabinet a helluva lot more power to call the shots in Ontario for the next four years. And here is hoping they call quite a lot of them in favour of building a decent jobs future for young people.

The latest employment figures, released by Statistics Canada earlier this July, show a province and country that has experienced stagnant job growth this spring, even while job opportunities for our American neghbours have continued to grow.

The job picture for people under the age of 25 in Ontario is particularly gloomy with an unemployment rate in the double digits and, according to Stats Canada date, many people between the ages of 18 and 25 simply dropping out of the pool of those seeking a job. That sounds like many have simply given up hope. Imagine, people that young giving up hope of finding a job? Where do we go from a situation like that? 

In the budget and in the Throne Speech her government delivered earlier this July, Wynne talks about wanting to address youth unemployment and now she will see if this talk translates into action.

Wynne might start by banning the practice of “unpaid internships” for young people in this province – a practice that allows business to exploit the work efforts of young people for free, and one that is aided and abetted by colleges and universities that, for whatever reasons, are requiring young people to seek out businesses that “offer” them several hundreds of hours of unpaid employment in order to earn their graduate diplomas or degrees.

This is nothing more than slave labour that depresses wages for all workers and all but eliminates any incentive for businesses to hire young people and actually pay them. After all, if universities and colleges are offering up a sizable pool of young people to work for free, why would they ever want to pay them?

There may be certain tax incentives or other rewards the government could offer businesses that actually hire and pay younger workers. 

The Wynne government should also take a real close look at why our colleges and universities seem to be doing such a poor job of encouraging students to go into programs that train them for jobs that are out there in this 21^st century. Over and over again, one keeps reading and hearing from business leaders say there aren’t enough people coming out of these schools with the skills they need now and for the future.

For seniors and others out there who don’t necessarily see youth unemployment in this province and in other regions of Canada and the U.S. as a crisis – and it is a crisis – ask yourselves who is going to work and pay taxes for health care and other social services most of us rely on more heavily as we grow older.

Niagara At Large will have more to say on this and related topics around the challenges younger generations face in future posts. Now it is your turn to wade in below.

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