Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to the committee for inviting me back.
I'll only make a few brief comments by way of an overview. It's going to be hard to top Tammy's presentation. I have included a few figures, which I think tell a clear story, and I believe members should have those figures.
I begin by setting an employment, or unemployment, backdrop for the over-25s, male and female. In other words, in my definition, they are not necessarily youth. My reason for doing that is that it tells you right away what the overall state of the economy is, or has been.
The unemployment rate tells you when things have been generally good or generally bad. It's easy with an unemployment rate figure, as in my first slide, to pick out the impact of some of the big shocks that we had, including one in the early 1980s, another a decade later, a smaller shock earlier this century, and another deeper one from the fall of 2008 to the spring of 2009. The unemployment rate trails these shocks a little bit. Firms don't start laying off right away, not in Canada; so the uptick in unemployment also trails by some months the downtick in market conditions.
On this history, I have a couple of overarching points. One is that the experience for men and women has been slightly different in past decades, and has also become a little more similar over time. Another is that in the almost five years since the end of the last recession, the labour market has been performing decently well, at least as measured by the unemployment rate, which, overall, is cruising in a pretty normal range.
That's the unemployment rate, or the share of the labour force actively looking for work. But what about the employment rate, or the share of the population that is working? This measure abstracts away questions concerning the number of job seekers who have become discouraged, or concerning the number of men or women who have otherwise left the labour force.
It tells a fascinating story. The most striking one is that the Canadian employment rate has generally picked up over time. We used to lag the U.S. by a lot, and that's just no longer the case. What's more striking is women's labour market activity. Changes in education patterns and in social and home structure really jump out at you. Over the past couple of generations, a huge wave of women has entered the paid labour force and it shows.
In case you're curious, women primarily entered the health, education, and public service fields, and therefore primarily unionized fields. But the key point here is that women have entered the labour force since the sixties and seventies, and it really shows up in the participation rate and economic outcomes.
This committee's study is on youth unemployment, so it seems to me we should have a look at the data by age group. I focused on desegregating the data by age and sex more so than by region, as did our friends from Statistics Canada.
Some folks would count youth as the 20- to 29-year-old group, or include the 25- to 29-year-olds, and I could make a good case for that. Tammy Schirle did include that and I'm grateful that she did because I looked a little more at the 15- to 19-year-olds and the 20- to 24-year-olds, and then compared them to the older groups.
I would tend to ignore or not put much emphasis on the 15- to 19-year-olds mostly because school issues dominate, or should; summer jobs come and go with the weather. I looked instead a little more carefully at the 20 to 24-year-olds with a view that if you're not in school and not working, you really should be working. Otherwise, you're going to face trouble later.
In my later figures, I used some arithmetic to filter out the peaks and valleys, so that the data revealed underlying trends. What these figures show is that there does not seem to be a significant cause for worry. Yes, the recent recession set the 20- to 24-year-olds back, but not the way prior recessions did, and they seem to be bouncing back pretty well. Put another way, if you look at the past five or six years, for the 15- to 19-year-olds, you would see a significant growth in unemployment, not a very happy story. But if you look at the 20- to 24-year-olds, you'll see a happier story indeed.
That's unemployment. What about employment?
It is pretty much the same. The 25- to 44-year-olds are going great. It is the same for the 45- to 64-year-olds. Both of these groups, of course, reveal the changing pattern of female employment from decades past. Again, life is a little less rosy for the 15- to 19-year-olds, but for the 20- to 24-year olds and up, the story is pretty much a lot of nothing.
What I do worry about—and it was nice to have reassuring words on this point from Professor Schirle—is the early-year labour market conditions for school leavers or recent graduates, whether from high school or from post-secondary. The data here do not indicate a problem but if there were to be future trouble, especially for income growth, it would come from having poor early experiences for new hires; in other words, being laid off a lot in your early years in the job market is bad for your long-term income trajectory.
What do we do about that? If it is a problem, that takes us to a short key policy list. Make sure kids finish public school and high school—