Good day, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.
My name is Joe Hersch. I'm the managing director of YouthjobsCanada. We have been in operation for eight years. We were founded in 2017.
The YouthjobsCanada mission statement is to bridge the divide in Canada between youth and at-risk youth ages 15 to 30 and employers by helping provide the building blocks for youth of all diversity, with an innovative, integrated and singular platform offering graduating options to building long-term relationships with employers.
The YouthjobsCanada vision statement is to provide a valuable resource in Canada to youth and vulnerable youth and employers in order to improve the job-ready skills of at-risk youth by working together in transition opportunities today in order to improve and lower the high youth unemployment rate in Canada tomorrow.
At the moment and since about 2021, we have been working with the Canada job bank with a feed of jobs that are posted on Canada job bank into YouthjobsCanada. We're in a somewhat unique position that way, and we value and respect the relationship we've been able to build with the Canada job bank and ESDC.
We also, in our heartfelt best wisdom, had this mission to truly help make a difference and bring down that high youth unemployment rate since 2017. Taking snapshots from year to year—and it's hit a lightning rod this year—everybody has come to the realization that youth unemployment is still really high.
Although we see some successes with the YESS program, we'd sure like to stimulate some further conversation between ESDC and the YESS program leadership group to find out how we can better collaborate and work together.
There are some contributing factors to why the youth unemployment rate is high. Earlier today, some individuals hit on some of those points, which we agree with. There are barriers there. There are individuals with disabilities and challenges to integrating into the workforce. That's not disputed but in order to try to really come up with a level playing field relative to why organizations may be choosing to look abroad, there has to be more work done to adjust youth expectations—we still see that as a concern—to increase reliability, to lessen turnover and to increase the productivity of youth. Those are undeniable from our standpoint.
The major industries that we continue to have employers post roles for...and we've had thousands and thousands of postings over the eight years that we've been in operation. The top three are still restaurant and hospitality, trades and technical, and health care. These seem to be the jobs that most traditional employers have a hard time filling. These typically end up with groups that are looking to try to make inroads into the workforce, and that's fine.
Working with ESDC and the YESS program, we'd like to see options for resource availability, not just to ourselves but to other external organizations. It appears that the program for YESS funding had a brief window of funding options, last available in 2023, but we'd sure like to recommend that this be looked at again to allow organizations to apply for funding so that support services can be put into place.
We've run quite the successful operation. We're privately funded, and we've been quite financially stable. The same can't necessarily be true for the organizations that are trying to make inroads to help solve the challenge; however, we're open to working together with ESDC and the YESS program leadership group.
We have three recommendations for you to consider.
First is options for solutions in the future for greater and improved integration and collaboration between YESS and ESDC involving the 11 federal departments and 14 federal programs. We see these programs as good but not necessarily enough. They're great starters to help youth have that work sensation and work experience, but they don't necessarily get them into industry because these 14 federal programs are with departments that have jobs internally available. It doesn't really get them into the market economy. We'd like to propose greater working co-operation among the YESS program, ESDC and other organizations, including YouthjobsCanada.
The second recommendation is options to consider incentive programs for employers in Canada for year-round wage subsidy options to stimulate investment in youth employment. We see that as pretty key because that way there's equity from both the market perspective and the social perspective that the federal government is trying to support.
The last recommendation is how the youth employment ecosystem we see could look in the future by modelling and focusing better on connecting the market employer opportunities and the YESS program deliverables. We see that as a gap—