A Better Deal for Youth? The 2015 Alternative Federal Budget

The Alternative Federal Budget ("AFB") is being released today by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. For the second year, Karen Foster and myself have put together the chapter on youth and I thought that it would be good to share what we came up with. There’s a ton of neat, wonky stuff in the AFB, here are the chapters that piqued my interest: child care; employment insurance; tax policy; gender equality; income inequality; post-secondary education; and, retirement security.

The thinking behind the youth chapter was motivated by any number of concerns. First, there’s certainly an understanding that there's a lack of intergenerational equity in all aspects of public policy setting. Second, the labour market post-financial crisis has been especially cruel to young workers in their 20s and 30s with a new normal of un(der)employment and precarious work, but absent any real regulatory or policy shifts. There’s no doubt that economic scarring is occurring and this will present any number of downstream effects which will hurt society for decades to come. Third, on a more optimistic note it’s clear that decisions can be made to implement ameliorative policies that can address the plight that young Canadians find themselves in. Over the past five odd years of thinking about these issues nothing is more apparent to me than the idea that explicit choices led us down the garden path and that only better choices can (partially) reverse and limit the damage that has already be done to this generation.

In terms of specific policies we proposed a range of measures touching on different areas of Federal responsibility. Here’s a snapshot of them:

• The creation of a Youth Labour Market Planning Board to move towards more demand-oriented labour market solutions. This body would work with sectoral development councils to ensure that Canada can better meet the workforce and training needs of employers. Another aspect of this body would be to coordinate the collection of better data on training, post-secondary placement rates, job openings, and unpaid internships;
• The creation of a workforce renewal fund to assist employers who wish to institute job-sharing programs to support the hiring and training of new workers;
• Ensure that young workers receive one-fifth of the jobs on all Federally-funded infrastructure projects;
• Institute a new training tax (OMG, a tax) on employers with payrolls greater than $250,000.00. The new tax would penalize employers who to spend less than 1% of the annual payroll on training young employees; 
• Re-instituting funding for paid internships at not-for-profit organizations. This measure would create twenty-thousand six-month internships every year. In the 1990s the Federal government supported tens of thousands of paid internships, so there’s a history of this type of policy;
• Amendments to Part II and Part III of the Canada Labour Code to fully protect students, learners, trainees and interns in the areas of labour standards, occupational health and safety, and workers’ compensation;
• The development of proactive labour standards enforcement to address the surge of unpaid internships in Federally-regulated industries (i.e. telecommunications, radio, and television); and, 
• Review EI to assess what changes are necessary to address what changes are needed to support young workers in the school-to-labour market transition given that prolonged periods of precarious work are now commonplace. This a personal pet peeve of mine I should add. I find it incredible that so few young people are able to collect EI. In 2013, only 18% of young male worker and 8% of young female workers were able to collect EI.

A lot of the other chapters in the AFB contain discussions that are pertinent to young people and their socio-economic concerns, so I highly recommend that you give the entire document a read (or even a skim). If you have any feedback or comments on the chapter or our recommendations please drop me a line as it’s my sincere desire to see more discussions about what can be done to assist young Canadians in turbulent economic times. Finally, here's me discussing precarious work, youth unemployment, and public policies responses at an IPAC symposium last fall.