Thank you.
I want to be very clear that I am not anti-immigrant, because I can't be anti-my mom and I sure as heck can't be anti-my dad either. I'm an extremely proud child of immigrants. I grew up in a country that offered my parents the opportunities they would never have been afforded in their countries. They're extremely proud Canadians, and I would never, ever shy away from that.
I was asked to discuss the root of youth unemployment. Whether you look at the Bank of Canada's paper—and I would submit to you that the Bank of Canada is not politically charged; we can agree it's an independent source—or whether you look at the labour force survey of July where it discusses the increase in youth unemployment, the issue is that we flooded a labour market. What I mean by flooded is the population of people aged 15 to 24 in 2021 was about 4.38 million people. It is now at 5 million on the button. That's 600,000 new people in that age cohort.
In that same time frame—I'm looking at the data right in front of me, from the labour force survey of Statistics Canada—in 2022, there were 2.5 million jobs for that same age cohort, and now there are 2.7 million jobs.
We can dink and dither about whether it's polite to say this or that, but the reality is that the reason youth unemployment is so high—it's the highest it's been ex-COVID since 1977—is a poorly thought-out immigration policy that directly affected it.
I have one more point. One of the problems that other witnesses mentioned was that businesses are always asking for experience. That credentialism is exactly what the Bank of Canada cited as one of the issues with flooding a labour market with low-skilled, low-wage workers.