Young Canadians left jobless amid influx of cheap foreign workers
It’s getting harder for young Canadians to find a job. A post-pandemic influx of cheap foreign workers in restaurants and retail stores may be making it tougher.
Michelle Eze started actively searching for work around Toronto in October, just as the youth unemployment rate in Canada began to surge. The 22-year-old public-policy graduate sought out teaching and restaurant service jobs to help pay the bills and support her parents, but struck out.
“I was struggling. I was searching on Indeed, looking everywhere, asking friends and like — nothing,” she said. “That was really demoralizing because I had the determination but I was seeing no results.”
Eze is still searching. Her difficulty underlines a disconnect in Canada’s labour market: Entry-level jobs for students and recent graduates are much harder to find as the economy weakens, yet the country has also imported hundreds of thousands of temporary foreign workers for jobs, many of them in the food and retail sectors.
That’s contributing to a soaring rate of youth unemployment. Two years ago, the jobless rate for people 15 to 24 years old was a little over nine per cent. Now it’s 14.2 per cent — the highest level in more than a decade outside of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For younger immigrants — those who’ve landed in Canada in the past five years — the unemployment rate is around 23 per cent.
An analysis of government data by Bloomberg News shows explosive growth in the number of temporary foreign workers in food and retail over the past five years. The number of them approved to work in those two sectors jumped 211 per cent between 2019 and 2023.
The rapid surge is partly fuelled by the increase in demand for immigration to Canada after pandemic travel restrictions eased.
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