I believe it was Microsoft that put out a report about some of the top jobs that are likely to be displaced or eroded. You've hit on the core challenge that labour economists have been looking at: To what extent is this technology complementary to existing jobs and enhancing them? Does it take away some of the drudgery work and let people focus on bigger skills, or is it displacing...and we see elimination?
When we look at the labour market for new grads, young people between the ages of 18 and 25, we know that they're having one of the toughest times in the labour market...tougher than, even, before the 1990s. We are seeing some early evidence that firms have chosen to take on, again, AI as a productivity-enhancing tool and as a substitute for training a young person. When we think about our economy in eight to 10 years, though I'd love to come back every December 3 to committee, I hope that I wouldn't have to testify about losing a layer of our labour market, not having senior engineers, writers or policy thinkers because we didn't bother to invest in having junior ones and we wanted to squeeze out a bit more productivity.
As we talk about the wartime efforts and investments that Canada has to make, we are going to have to think really seriously about other ways to support and stimulate smaller companies to train new grads, because it is costly, and we do have some programs for that and funding that people can access. However, really, a goal for Canada should be that, for youth employment—by the way, I'm the former chair of the expert panel on youth employment—we have meaningful, credible opportunities for young people to show off the skills that they already have instead of overfocusing on the supply of labour and the skills that they have, and recognize that the demand for labour may be fundamentally changing.