Finance committee  Good afternoon. We would like to thank the committee for the opportunity to speak with you today on subjects relevant to your study on youth employment. In today's presentation, we will be presenting a few highlights focusing on the labour market experiences of Canadian youth.

Finance committee  Actually, because of the time limit—and we do love to talk about our numbers too much—I didn't get a chance to mention that in April we are producing a study on overqualification among recent university graduates in Canada, and we'll be sure to pass that to the committee once it'

Finance committee  Actually, we do have data on immigrants in the labour force survey. They are identified—

Finance committee  We follow the international definition of work, and it's basically “work for pay or profit”. That was discussed recently at the International Labour Organization—what to do with those—but it's not considered to be working, so it depends on the—

Finance committee  It depends on their other characteristics, if they are looking for work or not.

Finance committee  We don't have that.

Status of Women committee  Merci. I hope everybody has a copy of the presentation in front of them, because I'll walk you through it. Good afternoon. We're very happy to be here. There is nothing Statistics Canada likes better than talking about the data. I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak

Status of Women committee  Yes, I will point out what slide I'm talking about and provide explanations.

Status of Women committee  I'm going to the second slide, which is basically gives a general overview of the participation of women in the labour force. The blue is the participation rate for men, and the red is the participation rate for women. If you look at the women's participation rate, I'm sure it

Status of Women committee  You want me to tell you whether the line is on top or at the bottom.

Status of Women committee  Okay.

Status of Women committee  Yes.

Status of Women committee  Okay.

Status of Women committee  The line on top is the participation rate for men, and the line on the bottom is the participation rate for women. If you look at it, because the interest of this group is on women, focusing in on the women, you can see that from the mid-1970s, which is when we had comparative

Status of Women committee  It's 15 years of age and over. So, generally, when we're looking at people in the labour market, we're looking at those 15 years of age and over, unless we say otherwise. So here we wanted to look at women overall. This is, again, looking at employment rate. The top line is men.