Madam Speaker, it is a great privilege, as always, to rise on behalf of the people of Elgin—St. Thomas—London South.
I remember so fondly the first real job I ever had. I was 14 years old. I did not get a glamorous job. I was busing tables in a hotel restaurant in south London. I was occasionally doing room service if they needed someone to pitch in. When they opened a new café, I got to try my barista skills, which were so subpar that I have ended up now as a member of Parliament and did not take my work pro.
I developed some incredible skills through that first job. I had a sense of purpose. I had a bit of money in my pocket at the age of 14. I made connections there that helped me get other jobs. I worked for years in a variety of restaurant jobs, doing things that, again, were not glamorous, but gave me a bit of money and gave me responsibility. That helped me on the path so that when I applied for my first job with a higher barrier to entry, I had a résumé that had on it years of work experience that I only got because there were jobs available to me when starting out.
To go back to the very first job I had at the hotel, years later, that hotel started filing labour market impact assessment requests and hiring temporary foreigners. There are youth that could not now do, at the very same place, what I did to start out on my vocational path when I was a teenager. This is something I am hearing about from youth all across my riding. They are sending out résumé after résumé and cannot get a job. Then they are finding out the place that would not hire them has temporary foreign workers working for it.
I know the Liberal government will say that is not the way the system works, but there is a wide chasm between how the system is designed and how it is unfolding in real time, right now, not just in my riding but in communities across the country. The reason we are having this debate in the House of Commons right now is that there is a youth jobs crisis. Over 460,000 young Canadians are out of work. The unemployment rate for Canadian youth is nearing 15%. Youth employment is at its lowest point in over 25 years outside of the pandemic.
This is, in fact, a crisis. It is one we do not learn about as members of Parliament simply because Statistics Canada has released the data. This has been, in my inbox anyway, a story I have been hearing since I was elected. If I am not hearing from the youth, I am hearing from their parents, saying their son or daughter cannot find a job.
To be clear, there are two seemingly contradictory trends happening in the workforce right now. I also hear from a number of employers who say they cannot find people to fill the job postings they have. There are some regional variations, most certainly, and there are some differences when it comes to sector. Employers are having a difficult time finding people to fill certain skilled roles. For entry-level jobs, which we would traditionally refer to as jobs in the service sector or hospitality sector, young people cannot get a foothold. They will send out dozens or hundreds of résumés even and not get a single interview, let alone a job offer.
The abundance of jobs that employers cannot find people to fill in certain skilled trades is a consequence of government policy from the Liberal government, and so too is the shortage of jobs for young people. These are both a direct consequence of Liberal government policy. It has stifled growth, has stifled mobility for workers, has made it more difficult for immigrants who come to Canada with credentials to be recognized and work, and has made it more difficult for young people to get a first job. This is because of unskilled temporary residents filling jobs that have Canadian workers lining up to take them.
In my riding, I represent a lot of farmers. The temporary foreign worker program has been a crucial part of the agricultural sector, but that is not the portion of the temporary foreign worker problem that we are seeing now drive young people out of having employment opportunities. The widespread expansion and abuse of the TFW program has become so bad that coveted first jobs are simply not available for Canadian youth.
Temporary foreign workers have ballooned now to nearly 2% of the total private workforce in Canada over the last decade. Three-quarters of temporary residents in the workforce earn less than the median income for Canadians, which means that we know temporary foreign labour drives down wages. It depresses wages and makes it more difficult for anyone commanding a market rate in Canada to get a job at a fair wage, because employers can find a temporary resident who is so grateful to have a foothold into Canada that they will work for the bare minimum.
We have also heard of examples of abuse of the program where even the stated dollar value, the stated wage of a position for a temporary resident, is not the take-home pay. There are schemes and kickbacks. We have heard of this happening. This is not to impugn all employers who use temporary labour, but it is to point out that there is a problem in the system that the Liberal government has allowed to fester.
It is not just an immigration problem, but we cannot separate what is happening to drive young people out of the workforce from what the Liberal government has done on temporary foreign workers. It is a problem that has become so big that the Conservatives came out with a very bold, but very necessary, position to scrap the temporary foreign worker program while keeping a stand-alone program for the agricultural sector for jobs that genuinely cannot be filled by domestic labour. We have seen this for decades; it is not just a trend in the last 10 years.
We do have a jobs plan for youth in this country. It is a plan that will open up the economy and eliminate the red tape and regulations that are making it difficult for employers, especially small and medium-sized businesses, to hire. It is a fix on the immigration system, which the Liberals have allowed to get so broken that only a Conservative government is capable of repairing it, making sure that Canadian jobs go to Canadian workers. This is not a radical proposition, but the Liberals treat it as though it is.
We need to fix training. Right now, one in six workers with post-secondary credentials is unable to find a job in the field in which they have been trained. We need to make sure that federal student training and funding programs are going towards employment-centred training, education and training that directly will help young people get into the workforce.
Last, we need to do more to bolster mobility and do what we can to harmonize credential recognition from one part of the country to the other. We need to make sure that an eager, keen, young person with a credential in Ontario can go to Manitoba, someone from Alberta can go to Ontario and vice versa so that they can go where the jobs are. Also, we need to make sure that housing is built where there is a need for labour so that housing prices, another consequence of 10 years of Liberal reign, are not making it so that a person is unable to live where they want to work.
This is the legitimate, concrete plan; a plan that I am begging the Liberal government to adopt. The Liberals have enjoyed many of our other policies, whether on crime or taxes. Let them take this as well, because I want Canadian youth to have a future. I want them to have the same future that I had from the time I was 14. By the way, it was at that hotel job where I first met Stephen Harper who was staying as a guest at that hotel. Perhaps that first job set me up on the path I took in several other ways as well.
I will close with an email I got from a constituent a couple of months back. It is from a man named Zain who said:
I've spent the last four years actively searching for employment in fields such as administration.... I hold postsecondary credentials from Conestoga College, and I've volunteered for three years to gain additional experience. Yet, despite my ongoing effort, I—like many Canadians—remain unemployed.
The federal government promotes employment support programs and encourages workforce participation, but the real experience of job seekers tells a different story.
Will the Liberal government listen to the countless youth, like Zain and many others across my riding and across the country, and secure a future for young Canadians to get jobs and know that they have a future in this country?