Saying goodbye to the no-job summer

Canadian youth were hammered by the toughest summer job market in decades ― a hard reality that may have lasting implications

AS WE WRAP up summer 2025 (sorry!), many young people will be heading back to school with fewer stories from their summer jobs to share. Or, none at all. With youth unemployment higher than it has been in a generation, it was something of a no-job summer for many in Canada.

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Officially, the youth employment rate was 53.6 per cent in July this year, which StatsCan notes is the lowest it’s been since 1998, excluding the pandemic. Some economists expect a turnaround in the works, like a group of BMO economists who wrote to “look for a gradual rebalancing of conditions in the youth job market ― it’s just going to take a while.” But whichever way you slice it, youth unemployment has been seriously elevated this year.

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Statistics can tell you one version of the story, but on the other side of the coin are all the young people who have just lost out on valuable work and life experiences. “I want to do something,” one 19-year-old Windsorite told CBC. “We’re the new generation and it feels like we’re behind — I want a car, I want to drive. I’m an adult now, so I want to feel like I’m an adult.”

Others spent their summer trying in vain to land something. “You show up and go with a résumé and then ask to talk to the manager,” said one 16-year-old. “A lot of the time they don’t call back.”

There are the usual suspects in the story of youth unemployment as well ― curmudgeonly business owners who think the younger generation are lazy, entitled and so on ― but when experts look at this, many are concerned more about the long-term effects, rather than the short-term.

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“What is the impact going to be on youth later on down their work pathway?” asked Jane Morrise-Reade, CEO of the Association of Service Providers for Employability and Career Training B.C. “We hear stories of youth applying for 100, 200 [jobs] and not hearing back at all from employers and not even receiving any notification, let alone an interview. That is soul crushing for an entire generation.”

With time pretty much up on summer jobs, skills development professionals like Morrise-Reade have started to think about how this situation can be improved in the coming years. And businesses can stand to gain a lot, she said.

“I think in my experience as an employer, hiring youth is really dynamic and can create an incredibly wonderful work environment for everybody that works at your organization.” Kieran Delamont