Thank you for the invitation.
As you may or may not know, I run the economic forecast at the Conference Board. One of the concerns we have, looking at labour markets in general for Canada, is the impact of tightening labour markets and what it will mean for long-term economic growth.
We look very carefully at labour markets and their makeup. This is not a new story, but essentially what we are seeing is a labour market that is suffering from an exodus of the baby boom cohort, which means that we'll see labour force growth really dwindling over the forecast horizon. What I usually tell organizations is that whereas they were able to grow their employment over the past decade or so by about 2% a year in Canada, looking ahead as we close the gap on full employment, we're looking at organizations being able to grow their employment by a third of that pace.
We think this is a fundamental issue for long-term growth overall, from the perspective of generating income. It's an issue, not just for growth itself but also because we feel we need to sustain growth to make sure we have the government revenues to keep this same baby boom cohort happy with respect to the health care burden.
That's the big picture from where we come.
When we look at labour markets more specifically, we feel that we've missed opportunities with respect to certain segments of the labour market. When I talk about general tightening in labour markets, I think that's very true. We have seen, however, very divergent growth across Canada and across different segments and cohorts in the labour market in Canada. When we talk about tighter labour markets, often there are certain groups and certain regions that have been affected differently. That is also very true.
I think, however, that an opportunity has been lost with respect to youth. When we look at the general strengthening, and it has not been very strong growth in labour markets over the last two years—in 2012-13, in particular—and consider the situation with respect to youth, we have lost about 200,000 jobs in that market; that is, for those aged 15 to 24. We have not seen one iota of pickup with respect to that cohort. Employment levels are about the same as they were, participation rates have not picked up at all, and I think we've missed an opportunity here to get youth back into the labour market.
There are three issues. We often talk about skills and we often talk about experience—a mismatch in skills or a mismatch in experience. Of course, we are seeing a cohort that's leaving the labour market, which is the baby boom, an experienced and older cohort, and what we are missing is experience and skills when bringing youth into the labour market. Mobility is also an issue. I'm not sure why the youth aren't as mobile as they could be.
I think there's an issue around bias with certain occupations and skills. We have seen demand growth for certain skilled trades in particular and we have not seen the supply. We have not seen youth enter into training for these.
Just to wrap up quickly, I think the other issue is that I don't think youth are well informed about where the opportunities lie. When they enter the educational system, they are biased, as I mentioned, towards university and college degrees, but they are not well informed about where the opportunities may be and are not taking up education and training in those fields where there may be better chances of employment.