Youth unemployment
, according to Statistics Canada’s latest release. That’s the highest non-pandemic July figure since 2009 (15.9 per cent), at the nadir of the Great Recession. It makes nothing but good sense that
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would position himself, as he did on Wednesday
, foursquare athwart bringing in any more temporary foreign workers to fill positions that certain employers swear blind they cannot fill with younger Canadians at any conceivable price.
“Why is (the government) shutting our own youth out of jobs and replacing them with low-wage temporary foreign workers from poor countries who are ultimately being exploited?” Poilievre asked, rhetorically, on Wednesday. By rights it ought to be a solid populist pitch to Canadians, and no-brainer policy besides.
Companies who use TFWs will insist it’s not about finding “cheaper” help, but about finding
any
help. Tim Hortons defended itself Wednesday noting that less than five per cent of its national workforce were TFWs — which seems like
a very high number
, right? It’s not just me? — and those hires tended to be clustered “in small towns and communities where local candidates are not available.”
But an odd sort of small town or community, surely, that can’t live without a Timmy’s, but that doesn’t have enough people to work at it. And it’s an odd sort of remedial program, surely, to bring in employees not from other parts of Canada but rather from halfway around the world. Especially since groups like the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) swear blind they’re
not
after an hourly wage discount, just anyone who’s willing and able to fill the position. It was certainly
a very odd kind of fishing resort
, it struck me, that claimed this summer it couldn’t find any Canadian employees and needed the TFW program instead.
Didn’t kids used to flock en masse cross-country to take outdoorsy jobs every summer? Have I not read 150 tiresome baby-boomer op-eds on the topic?
The special pleading sometimes beggars belief. And unemployed young Canadians aren’t free to you and me, after all — whoever’s fault it is, if anyone’s, they’re an anchor on the economy.
A Deloitte study commissioned by the King’s Trust Canada
, published in November, estimated “that under the right conditions, overall real GDP could increase by $18.5 billion by 2034 — more than Canada’s entire arts, entertainment and recreation sector — and (Canada could) add an additional 228,000 jobs in the process” if “youth engagement in the workforce” significantly increased.
I have no polling, and hardly even any anecdote, to back this up, but my sense is that many Canadians came around
during Alberta’s oil boom of the 2000s
to the silliness of the “business case” for imported workers toasting bagels, ringing up groceries and making beds in hotels because it was impossible to find homegrown help at any price “the market could bear.” As if a $12 hamburger combo or a $150 room at a midrange hotel chain were obvious market failures, even as wages and incomes of people who ate and stayed in the area soared nearly across the board.
Perhaps our recent experiences with inflation, the likes of which my generation and younger hadn’t really dealt with before, have injected a dose of reality into this conversation: Suddenly a $12 hamburger combo doesn’t seem so unreasonable. Maybe a $50,000 income to make hamburger combos shouldn’t be unreasonable either.
Not to sound churlish, but the other obvious advantage here for Poilievre’s Conservatives is Mark Carney’s Liberals. They’ll happily make up three dozen unlikely solutions to problems, put them in a platform, and do bugger all about them (or do the opposite) after they win the election. But they also have this terrible habit of nuancing things that really don’t need nuance — of trying to find “balance” between two positions that don’t need balancing.
Positions like “we should be filling Canadian jobs with Canadian people” strike many Liberals as, quite simply, too unfancy to be of any conceivable worth. And so adamant is their belief in Conservative perfidy, of the party’s ill-intent toward Canada as a whole, that some will tell you cutting back on temporary foreign workers is really about cutting back on immigration period, because Conservatives don’t like immigrants … even as the
Liberals
claim to be cutting down on immigration, including TFWs, as well!
Uber-Liberal pollster Bruce Anderson took up the gauntlet this time around on X: “Watching the Conservative attack on foreign workers in the past few weeks has brought to mind more their culture war efforts … than practical economic policy,” he wrote. In other words: Cutting immigration literally isn’t the same thing when Liberals do it.
Anderson later deleted his missive, perhaps having been told how stupid and insulting to the average voter it was. “Sure, maybe your kid can’t find a summer job for the third consecutive summer, or at all post-graduation, but surely you’re not going to let this low-born clod Poilievre govern you
just for that?
”
Prime Minister Carney is much smarter than all that, to my eye, but many of the people around him are certainly not. Many are much dumber. This is an excellent opportunity for Poilievre to get policy right, in what should be his ideological and political wheelhouse, and make his primary opponent look a bit silly in the offing.
Who’s going to argue with Canadian jobs for Canadian kids? Other than a cornered Liberal, I mean?
National Post
cselley@postmedia.com
