Mr. Speaker, today, we have thousands upon thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of young Canadians who have done exactly what they were asked to do. They went to school. They studied hard. They gave their best effort on the promise that, at the end of all that, they would be able to get a job and start a career. What they are experiencing right now is a broken promise by their government. They are experiencing a job market that is lacking in jobs and opportunities. In fact, many are feeling overwhelmingly anxious right now when they think about what their future holds.
It is heartbreaking to see and hear, and many of us in the House see and hear that from our constituents on a regular basis. For me, in Bowmanville—Oshawa North, I hear that very often from students at Durham College and Ontario Tech who have worked very hard and gotten good grades. They really should be feeling excited about what awaits them, yet they are anxious every single day.
We know the unemployment crisis facing young people, where we have 460,000-plus Canadians between the ages of 15 and 24 looking for work, has exacerbated many of the issues young people are already facing in this country. Boys and young men in particular are disproportionately shouldering a burden for very many social and cultural problems right now, including opioid overdoses, suicides and homelessness. They are victims of violent crime and dropping out of high school. The unemployment crisis makes all of those things even worse.
I myself was once a young man struggling in the school system, labelled illiterate by the Ontario public schools for failing a literacy test in grade 10. I know for a fact that if not for the chance to work, I might have never finished high school and I might not be standing here right now. For years, I found work in restaurants, at Red Lobster and other places, working as a dishwasher or a line cook. It was not glamorous at all. Scraping seafood off pots and pans is not the stuff people dream about doing one day, but the skills I learned, the personal attributes I gained from working at night made up for all the things I was not able to learn and do during the day in a classroom.
When we see these statistics about young people not having jobs, it is more than just not having a paycheque every week or every two weeks; it is also a sign of young people being robbed of the personal development and growth that is necessary for the future leaders of our country. The research is very clear on this: when one works as a young person, they learn things they might not learn anywhere else in their life. They learn responsibility, time management and conflict resolution. They learn how to be responsible for other people, how to work as a team, social skills and personal development that is essential, personal development that, when it is lacking, becomes a problem for all of us, because we all depend on the young people of today to be leaders for our country in the future.
I have been worried for quite some time that young people would internalize the bad economy created as a result of 10 years of Liberal policy, and they would blame themselves for the lack of opportunity in front of them. I have worried for a long time that young people would think they had made mistakes or think they had made the wrong choices and that is why they are struggling in the economy right now. This is one of the reasons I have been visiting university and college campuses across Ontario and soon the rest of the country. It is precisely to hear them out and hear what is going on, what is weighing on their hearts and their minds, but also to deliver a very clear message: It is not their fault.
In fact, the economy they see before them right now is a result of a series of bad choices and bad policies made by people in positions of power. Liberal politicians, corporate bigwigs on Bay Street and bureaucrats here in Ottawa have consistently put the interests of the next generation of leaders in this country on the back burner to serve all sorts of, frankly, bizarre ideological agendas. Young people need to know this, because we do not want young people to feel discouraged and demoralized.
We want them to know that better choices are possible, a better future is possible and, in fact, how we get to that better future, in many ways, can depend on their being involved in our democracy and our political process and their gaining the ability to be leaders in this country to make decisions for our institutions that would be forward-thinking and not backward-looking.
I believe that when we talk about the choices made by people in positions of power, it is helpful to be specific. Here today, we have heard about some of the policies that have been enacted by the government for the last decade that have held back our economy from the necessary growth required for young people to have jobs and careers. We have heard about the anti-resource policies, high taxes and heavy red tape. We have heard also about the fact that the labour market has been completely misaligned, not just at the post-secondary level but also when it comes to immigration policy.
When I visit university and college campuses, I hear that young Canadians across this country know that small tinkering at the edges of the status quo is far from enough to create the changes necessary for young people to be optimistic and hopeful about their future. Small programs and small policy changes by a government that is pretending right now that it is different from what this country has had for the last decade are simply not going to get the job done. Young people know that real, serious, substantive changes are required and there may be no better example of that than immigration policy.
We saw here in this very chamber, just a few hours ago, the Liberal government once again double down on irresponsible and unsustainable immigration policy, creating a new system of unlimited chain migration; doubling down on the very policies the Liberals pretend they want to fix. When the time comes to exercise their power to fix the system they have broken, they continually fail and demonstrate that they have learned nothing from 10 years of breaking an immigration system that was once heralded as the envy of countries around the world. This very day, just hours ago, the Liberals once again voted for Liberal immigration policies, not knowing and not being able to answer to the people of this country how many new people would be entering this country as a result of this legislation.
Young people know very clearly, because they have eyes and they have ears, that things have changed dramatically in this country and they feel it every time they apply for a job. They can see that we have too many people, not enough houses; too many people, not enough jobs; and too many people, not enough public services. They are being asked to turn a blind eye to the reality they see in front of them every day and pretend that the government has their best interests in mind, which is simply not true.
I have encountered, on these college and university campuses, people from across the political spectrum, some who voted for us in the last election, some who did not; some who vote regularly and some who have never voted before. However, the common thread among the students with whom I have spoken, a thread that I wish were visible here in the House of Commons, is an understanding that change is required and the status quo simply is not working. Young people are bearing the brunt of failed policy for over a decade and they are asking for something new. They are asking for something different. When we talk about youth employment, job losses and what is happening to the next generation of leaders in this country, we are talking about the need for change. I mean real change; I do not mean changing the leader of a party and pretending that it is a new government.