Thank you very much, Chair.
Welcome, Minister.
I'm going to read a bit into the record first, regarding some of your testimony. According to the OECD, Canada experienced a larger change in youth employment during the pandemic compared to other OECD countries:
In 2019, the year prior to the pandemic, Canada's youth unemployment rate was 11%. The youth unemployment rate in the UK was similar at 11.4%, higher in Ireland at 13.5%, and lower in Germany at 5.7%.
In June 2020, the youth unemployment rate in Canada increased over 16 percentage points to 27.4%.
You alluded to that, but in countries such as Germany and the U.K., where job retention programs were introduced, they experienced increases of only 1.6 and 2.4 percentage points respectively.
By summer 2021, youth unemployment rates largely recovered but remained elevated compared with their levels in 2019 across most of the OECD countries, and Canada was no exception to this trend. In Canada, the youth unemployment rate in June of 2021 was 2.6 percentage points higher than in June of 2019. The difference was lower for Germany and the U.K. at 1.2 and 1.5 percentage points, respectively, but slightly higher for Ireland....
Specifically looking at this, we know that there were job retention programs, but in Canada we didn't actually have that. It was very, very different for people when it came to job retention.
Minister, I'm reading this into the record so that I can talk about key indicators. In 2016 we saw a doubling of the Canada summer jobs program, where we saw a nominal increase from 2015 and 2016 of 0.1%. When I'm looking at the 2021 funding for the program, which was five times more than in 2015, and I'm removing the data from 2020 and 2021, can you advise me of whether quadrupling the funding for Canada summer jobs actually quadrupled the number of jobs?