It's interesting to note that when we prepared this brief back in June, the unemployment rate for youth was 15.9%. As of mid summer it went up to 16.3%. Their rate is twice the national average of the overall population. Canada will be facing a structural unemployment situation among youth if there isn't immediate action taken.
In the budget, $53 million was added to the youth employment strategy, but not one penny was targeted toward at-risk youth; it was all targeted at students. If these young people aren't given the work experience opportunities and skills now, when the economy moves into recovery they will not be prepared to enter the workforce.
There are hundreds of not-for-profit organizations across the country that have Skills Link programs on the shelf and ready to go, but there's no funding. There is an apparatus in place that you can move on this social infrastructure intervention immediately. Service Canada has the structure all in place.
Where is the money? There is no money. We were capped at the same amounts we've had in the previous three years.
This is a crisis that we're facing among young people right now. There is an opportunity. There is an infrastructure in place. There are companies that are willing to give them a chance, small, medium, and ma and pa operations willing to give them an opportunity, but the federal government is not stepping up to the plate. It is not providing this group of young people an opportunity to give back to Canadian society, and they will continue to cause a drain on our GDP if we don't move now. This is the time to act.
The government is slipping money into infrastructure projects every day, and we know it because it's in every newspaper every day. Here is an opportunity where we can move tomorrow on this. You can move on this tomorrow and the result would be that this money would flow through the economy within weeks, because there are organizations like ours right across the province in major cities and mid-sized cities and small communities. So it would have an actual impact across the entire country, but the time to act on it is now.