Human Resources Committee on Oct. 21st, 2025

[The Chair (Robert Morrissey (Egmont, Lib.)), Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Good morning, committee members. It is 11 o'clock. The clerk has advised that we have a quorum, so we will begin meeting nine of the HUMA committee.

Pursuant to the motion adopted on Thursday, September 18, 2025, the committee is meeting on youth employment in Canada.

Today’s meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the Standing Orders of the House. Members are appearing in the room or on Zoom. There are a few points we'll go over. The witnesses appearing electronically have been sound-tested and have passed. All members have the choice to participate in the official language of their choice. I advise those of you in the room to make sure that you have your earpiece on and you're on the appropriate channel for the language you choose. To those appearing virtually, use the icon at the bottom of your Surface to choose the official language of your choice. If there's a breakdown in translation services, please get my attention and we'll suspend while it is being corrected. To those online, use the “raise hand” icon to get my attention. We'll do that as well.

Also, for the benefit of our translators, I would ask that all of your devices be put on mute or silent so they do not ring during the meeting. Please refrain from tapping the microphone boom. It can cause popping, which can be a problem for our translators. As well, please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking and direct all questions through me, the chair.

We will begin today's meeting of 2 one-hour sessions. Appearing in the first panel on youth employment today, I would like to welcome, as an individual, Christopher Worswick, professor; and from Youth Employment Services, appearing online virtually, Timothy Lang, president and chief executive officer.

Each witness will have five minutes to do a presentation. If you're getting over a bit, I will say, “Thank you”, at which time I will expect you to wind up your comments quickly.

With that, I begin with Professor Worswick for five minutes or less, please.

[Christopher Worswick, Professor, As an Individual]

Thank you, everyone, for giving me this opportunity to present to the committee and answer any questions you may have.

As I see it, the recent increase in youth unemployment in Canada is concerning and is likely due to, first, the recent weakening of the Canadian economy in response to the U.S. tariffs imposed and the threats of new ones and, second, the recent rapid expansion of the Canadian population driven mainly by an unprecedented increase in the temporary resident population of younger individuals.

When we think about this using basic economic supply-and-demand arguments, the labour supply curve of the lower-wage service sector of the Canadian economy shifted out dramatically just prior to the labour demand curve shifting in due to a weakening of aggregate demand in Canada. These two effects should each lower wages for this segment of the labour market, and given that these workers are close to the minimum wage, either effect could lead to higher youth unemployment.

It is difficult to know how to attribute weight or importance to each of these potential causes. However, the second cause is no doubt important, and certainly the flow of temporary residents in and out of the country is within the federal government’s control, so I will focus my comments on this policy area.

The expansion of the temporary resident population was due mainly to growth in three subcomponents: the temporary foreign worker program; the international mobility program; and the international student population.

I've taken some comments from a recent Globe and Mail opinion piece that I wrote on this topic.

In response to the original temporary foreign worker program controversy under the Harper government, Pierre Brochu, Till Gross and I explored the labour market implications of this program in a 2020 article in the Canadian Journal of Economics. In our model, workers exert higher work intensity, resulting in higher productivity, in situations where the wage paid is higher than their next best alternative.

For Canadian citizens and permanent residents, the alternative to a Canadian job is likely another job in Canada with a similar wage. In contrast, a temporary foreign worker may much prefer the job in Canada to what they would have in their home country, since a temporary foreign worker is normally not allowed to move to another job in Canada. Consequently, a temporary foreign worker will have higher work intensity and may be prepared to tolerate illegal activities by their employer, such as unsafe work conditions and a holding back of part of their wages.

The TFW program can not only slow wage growth but may actually cause wages to fall. Employers should anticipate the higher work intensity of temporary foreign workers and offer a lower wage when initially advertising the job to Canadians, because failing to fill the position means they can hire a temporary foreign worker, yielding higher expected profits for the firm. International mobility programs and international student programs have similar issues, so the surge in numbers in all three programs is likely to have hurt the employment prospects of younger Canadians.

In contrast, permanent immigration programs do not have these issues, as the rights of permanent immigrants are nearly identical to those of Canadian citizens. Consequently, the Canadian labour market can be expanded through permanent immigration rather than temporary foreign workers. Curtailing or even eliminating the TFW program need not limit the number of foreigners being welcomed to Canada.

International students working off campus may be a greater threat to youth employment prospects than temporary foreign workers. The surge in the past five years in international student numbers, especially at the college level in Ontario, coupled with relaxed rules on numbers of hours worked, has greatly expanded the supply of lower-wage service sector workers.

Canada needs to go back to stronger restrictions on hours of work off campus to limit the extent to which international students compete with lower-wage young workers. International student numbers need to be monitored more closely and ideally limited to post-secondary programs leading to earnings above the Canadian average after graduation, as these individuals are strong candidates for permanent residency as economic immigrants.

We should also consider eliminating the temporary foreign worker program especially in areas where these workers compete with younger Canadians. It could be replaced with higher permanent immigration. We should also look at the international mobility program to see if there may be components of this suite of visas that should be eliminated or capped.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Professor Worswick, for your time.

We'll now hear from Mr. Lang.

You have five minutes or less.

[Timothy Lang, President and Chief Executive Officer, Youth Employment Services]

Thank you, Chair, and honourable members. It's good to be here.

I'm Tim Lang, president and CEO of Youth Employment Services. We serve close to 15,000 youth a year, with partners right across Canada. Primarily, our offices are GTA-based and across Ontario, but as just a quick aside, I'm happily joining you from Saskatchewan, where I am originally from—Saskatchewan and Winnipeg.

I only mention that because it reminds me of my own father, who served in cabinet for about 11 years in the sixties and seventies. I thank you so much for your hard work and dedication. As a kid, I certainly saw first-hand the sacrifices you all make, so thank you for your service to Canada. I will mention that my father unfortunately left politics due to illness. The voters of Saskatchewan got sick of him. Hopefully, that does not befall any of you.

I'm happy to be here today to talk about, hopefully, real solutions. There's no silver bullet, but certainly some of the work we do is a partial solution. I'll just quickly talk about what we do.

We are Canada's largest and leading youth employment service provider. As I like to joke, when we started, the Toronto Maple Leafs were Stanley Cup champions. We've been around a long time.

Over those 60 years, we've seen everything through the ups and downs of the economy. We have learned to adapt to ensure that we can place the tens of thousands of youth we see—largely youth who have great barriers to employment—into employment. We have close to a 90% success rate. We work with tens of thousands of businesses to give youth a chance. Through our training programs or our one-on-one counselling, we provide them with job-ready skills and also life skills, letting them know that they're going to get knocked down and they have to get back up. We're giving them the resiliency skills and the hope. Then we work with businesses, all for free, to help put them into employment.

We now have cybersecurity programs, which is an in-demand area. The Ontario government has been great at the trades, and now the federal government is looking at that as well. It's so important. We have trades programs. We have general programs. We have entrepreneurial programs. We have mentorship programs.

A new significant area of focus has been in helping youth with mental health disabilities. Through our WorkAbility programs, we're working across the country to help businesses understand the importance of hiring people with mental health disabilities. They can sometimes be their longest-term employees and are a benefit to the organization.

All that to say, we have a great impact. Our frontline staff work with youth, day in and day out, and it works. The return on investment—the investment in organizations like ours and our partners across Canada—is that every dollar spent returns three to the economy.

I have always said that Canada is a great nation for a lot of reasons. Two of the biggest factors are, obviously, a strong market economy with businesses that hopefully create jobs and innovation, balanced by our social safety net—primarily, of course, our universal health care. We're the next layer of an important part of that social fabric that keeps us strong and helps those who don't need a handout but do need a hand-up.

I mention this because what we do works. It has a true impact, day in and day out. We have targets we have to hit. My background is in the private sector, which is a hard-driving, results-driven environment, and I've created that in our organization because we cannot fail: Our targets are actual people.

This is something that works. Part of the message I wanted to tell you today is that the investment works and we need it to continue. I admit, though—and I'm not going to make any friends here with the people in this sector—that it is disappointing when I see sometimes hundreds of millions spent on organizations that do research, round tables and have fancy, glossy outputs and data and more data on things we see every day and know every day. Here we are getting a very small amount of investment, and we see tens of millions spent on that.

I know all of you in the room agree that youth employment is important. Deloitte research lately said that if nothing is done, it could cost the economy up to $18 billion by the 2030. If we act, the contrary is true, and it could grow the economy and create hundreds of thousands of jobs.

I'm hoping that, increasingly, we look not at giving valuable, scarce resources to organizations that do more research, but instead give it to what I call “impact organizations” like ours, which actually have an impact that's been proven. You have to look closely because a lot of organizations say that they have an impact, but is it trickle-down? Is it through research, consulting or round tables?

There's no silver bullet, of course, but certainly we are part of a social fabric that really can help improve youth unemployment because we've seen it work. We do it, day in and day out.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Mr. Lang.

I assume your father was Otto Lang.

[Timothy Lang]

That's correct. He's 93. I have a cabinet picture on the wall, and everyone's dead except Jean Chrétien and my dad.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

They're the same age.

Thank you for your comments.

We will begin the first round of questioning, which is six minutes, with Madam Falk.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, SK]

Thank you very much, Chair.

Thank you to both of our witnesses for being here and sharing your experience and knowledge with our committee.

I will begin with Mr. Worswick.

First, how does Canada's current immigration policy impact the labour market for young people, particularly when it comes to those early-entry jobs?

[Christopher Worswick]

If you define the immigration program broadly to include the temporary migration program, then, as I argued in my opening statement, I do think there are concerns that we have admitted large numbers of temporary residents under different categories, including the temporary foreign worker program, international mobility program and international student program, who all have, to differing degrees, the capacity to work for income.

All these people are typically quite similar in age to young Canadians so it's reasonable to think that they're competing for similar types of jobs. I'm not saying that every temporary foreign worker competes directly with young Canadians, but I think there's a lot of overlap there. That's why I stressed in my comments the international students, because I think international students tend to be near campus and in cities where a lot of young Canadians are on average. I am concerned that this is putting downward pressure on wages.

In cases where the jobs are close to minimum wage, it may be creating youth unemployment.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, SK]

If we talk beyond the labour market, what broader impacts do you see stemming from the current immigration levels?

[Christopher Worswick]

The labour market is the obvious place.

I guess housing could be an issue. I don't consider myself an expert on housing economics. Whatever population growth we have, we need to have growth in dwellings to match that. My sense is that it hasn't kept up. Large population growth requires that our public health system expand proportionally. I'm doubtful that this has happened. I've seen numbers to indicate that it hasn't happened.

Those, what I would call, “regulated parts” of the labour market would be where I would be most concerned. I think you can expand economies with immigration. You can do it in a way so that wages do not need to fall, although it's not a guarantee, but if immigration or temporary migration is concentrated in particular segments of the labour market, you can see negatives outcomes there, even if you're not seeing average effects.

It comes down to, in the labour market setting, whether the temporary migrants are substitutable in production with the people you're concerned about—in this case, younger Canadians.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, SK]

I know something I have heard over and over so far in this committee is that this isn't siloed. It seems like the government members, through their questioning, are led to believe that our labour impact is siloed and not affecting these other facets. People need a house to live in. When you look at health, you need good health to be able to work. We also have mental health. There are these wraparound services that also need to be available and accessible.

I guess that's where my question's coming from. How much is this affecting these other areas? It doesn't matter if you're a temporary worker here, you still have access to health services, etc., and so do Canadians. How much of that is impacting other things and making a ripple effect?

[Christopher Worswick]

They must be connected. I haven't seen quantitative studies that say how important they are, but I think what we're seeing with international students is that many people are living in small dwellings. Even if you say, well, that's the international students and perhaps they're choosing that out of necessity, it will still have an impact on that part of the housing market.

For some temporary foreign workers, they probably alleviate health care shortages—I'm thinking of nursing assistants and PSWs—but it's very hard to get doctors accredited in Canada if they're foreign-trained. It's very hard to see how that part of the health care system isn't under strain because of the population growth. This isn't meant to be a negative statement about immigration. It's more that if you have high levels of immigration, you need to have all sectors of the economy growing, and highly regulated sectors haven't been growing.

There's also the issue of temporary and permanent that we tend to gloss over in Canada. I think we should be looking at permanent immigration. Those workers will have more rights. They can move to whatever job is best for them. That's what we did prior to 2000 almost exclusively in Canada.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, SK]

Thank you.

Mr. Lang, thank you for your opening remarks.

How important is it for young people to have access to an entry-level job as a stepping stone to their career development or goals?

[Timothy Lang]

It's critically import. The Deloitte research that I quoted also showed what they termed as “scarring”. When young people are unemployed for long periods of time, the evidence shows that it affects them the rest of their lives. By the time they're 40, they can earn as much as 20% less. That's a GDP issue, but we also know that employment is a social determinant of health. That winds into it as well. It's really critical that we act and do all we can.

[Rosemarie Falk, Conservative, Battlefords—Lloydminster—Meadow Lake, SK]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bobby Morrissey]

Thank you, Mrs. Falk.

Madam Koutrakis, you have six minutes.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for joining us here today. Thank you for the work you do to support Canadian youth.

Professor Worswick, you said in your opening remarks that the two biggest issues you see leading to the current youth unemployment situation are, first, the “weakening of the Canadian economy” due to the uncertainty in the U.S. tariffs and everything that comes with that; and second, the “rapid expansion of the Canadian population”. You go on to mention the temporary foreign worker program, international students and temporary foreign worker mobility. You also said that the “greater threat” of those three is the international student.

In November 2024, the federal government did reduce both the number of hours that international students are able to work and the level coming in. Have you seen an impact since then on youth employment due to that change?

[Christopher Worswick]

The short answer is that I have not, but I have not seen research on it, to be fair. As well, the timing would be difficult to disentangle, because the economy is slowing at the same time.

To perhaps get at your question more deeply, I think those were good policy changes. I just think more should be done. The changes you described were a movement in the right direction.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Currently, would you say that the biggest threat to youth unemployment and the barrier it presents is the weakening of the Canadian economy due to the U.S. tariffs, or do you still think it's the rapid expansion? Of the two, which one do you believe is the bigger barrier right now?

[Christopher Worswick]

It's a good question. I'm not sure, to be honest. I put them as pretty equal, in my mind.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

Thank you.

Mr. Lang, thank you for being here and for your testimony. Thank you for the work you do through YES. I know a little bit about your organization. I try to stay up to date with it. It's quite the model.

I'm wondering if you can share with us today a particular model of collaboration that you have seen in your work experience that makes a difference, and if you can provide some details of what that collaboration looks like and who is involved.

[Timothy Lang]

Thanks for the question.

Since we're always trying to get better and progress, we are constantly trying to improve our model. We have a great model, but as far as collaboration goes, part of the key is, of course, collaborating with the tens of thousands of businesses. We work not only with large organizations but also with a lot of small organizations as well. We're able to—especially for the small and medium enterprises—be almost like a free HR resource. We provide them with talent that is job-ready, and then, if they have issues, they can call us, and we can either find someone new or work with that person.

Certainly, collaboration in the market has been so important and has to continue, but it also allows us to hear what the new needs are. It allows us to adapt and change. That collaboration has been critical to our success and, more importantly, to the success of allowing us to place hundreds of thousands of youth into employment, partially because a lot of youth don't know what's out there. That's why the free resources in every community like ours helps youth when they come, a lot of times, distraught, especially lately. We've been seeing more at our doors than in a long time. They're not even aware of what's out there and what's possible, so that's why that collaboration is so important.

The other thing is that, of course, any time there's more collaboration between organizations across the country.... Because we're seen as the leader, we help to provide free curriculum or training, especially in mental health lately because it's on the rise. Every collaboration and type of collaboration works.

Then of course, finally, the all-important support from government has been fantastic when it's there. We just need it obviously to be maintained or increased. That's why I said that it's sometimes disappointing to see tens of millions spent on organizations that do research and so on, when I wish it was more towards the frontline impact, like you had said. Thank you for acknowledging that.

I thank my frontline staff who work with youth, day in and day out.

[Annie Koutrakis, Liberal, Vimy, QC]

I'm just wondering if you're familiar with some of the programs that are in place in jurisdictions like Germany and Japan, for instance. We hear that their youth unemployment numbers are a lot less than we see here in Canada, in North America or elsewhere around the world. I'm just wondering if there are some learnings that we can take away from those two jurisdictions that you may be familiar with and that you can share with us here.

How can we be doing better when looking at those models?