Thank you for the question.
It's been said a couple of times that there is no story. There is nothing to look at here because young people aren't as unemployed as they were in the 1980s. I was caught in the 1980s unemployment and I know how bad it was.
What is different this time around is that there has been virtually no improvement in the number of jobs available to the 15- to 24-year-old cohort. A lot of people have talked about what has happened to the older end of that, but if young people can't work while they're in school, they're not going to be able to pay for education, and everybody is saying that education is your ticket to something better.
I would just like to compare and contrast that the youth unemployment rates were higher in the 1980s, certainly, not by a lot but enough. But the Progressive Conservative government of that day introduced numerous measures to deal with unemployment rates there that totalled billions of dollars through the Canadian jobs strategy. Youth was one particularly targeted clientele. Hundreds of thousands of participants went through the Canadian jobs strategy.
In contrast the last budget of the federal government introduced $55 million to create 4,000 new paid internships. At last count there were 380,000 young people actively looking for work. That's about 1% of what's going on.
So more can be done. Will you find this a compelling enough story to do something?