On International Youth Day, Canada’s labour market is sending a clear message. Young people need more than encouragement. They need a genuine first chance.
By Surranna Sandy, Chief Executive Officer, CivicAction
Every year on August 12, International Youth Day recognizes the energy and contribution of young people. The United Nations theme for 2026, “Different Contexts, Common Aspirations,” fits Canada well. Young people grow up in very different circumstances, but their aspirations are familiar: meaningful work, security, and the chance to build a future.
For too many, that future is getting harder to enter.
Canada’s labour market strengthened in July, but the headline numbers hide a generational divide. The national unemployment rate was 6.4 per cent. For people aged 15 to 24, it was 12.6 per cent, nearly twice the overall rate and still above the pre-pandemic youth average of 10.8 per cent.
The experience is also far from uniform. Statistics Canada’s July data put the unemployment rate for Black youth at 22.6 per cent, compared with 15.4 per cent for Chinese youth and 13.9 per cent for South Asian youth. Some groups have improved over the past year, but these gaps have proven stubborn.
These are more than statistics. Early jobs are where young people build the networks, references and confidence that qualify them for the next opportunity. When that first opening narrows, the effects can follow people for years.
Why the entry point is narrowing
There is a change underway here that deserves more attention.
We talk often about artificial intelligence and what it could mean for entry-level work. AI will transform many occupations. But emerging research suggests something else is already reshaping early-career opportunity: the way we have redesigned work itself.
Research featured in the Harvard Business Review examined more than 50 million job postings, alongside experiments with 1,200 hiring managers. It found that remote positions demand more skills, experience and credentials than otherwise comparable in-person roles. One reason is that employers see inexperienced workers as harder to train and supervise from a distance.
A separate working paper from researchers at the University of Warwick and Oxford tracked 243 million hires and 407 million job postings across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia between 2017 and 2025. Early-career hiring fell across all four countries after 2022, and the sharpest declines were in the occupations best suited to remote work.
The paper’s most striking finding is about AI. The jobs most exposed to generative AI are often the same professional jobs that shifted most easily to remote work. Looked at on its own, AI exposure appeared to explain the drop in junior hiring. But once the researchers accounted for remote work, the remote-work effect held while much of the apparent AI effect faded. None of this clears AI of a role, but it is a reason to be careful before settling on a single explanation.
There is something else at stake too. Young workers have always learned on the job, by watching colleagues, asking questions, getting feedback, and taking on more responsibility over time. In distributed workplaces, none of that happens automatically. Organizations have to design for it, and when they do not, the easier choice is to hire someone who already has five years of experience.
The result is a bind. Employers want experience at the very moment it is getting harder to acquire.
Opportunity has to be built
This is one reason programs like CivicAction’s Youth CivicCorps matter.
Youth CivicCorps connects young people aged 18 to 30 across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area with organizations working on housing, affordability and economic inclusion. Across three cohorts, 120 participants take part in project-based placements, coaching and hands-on learning, with a focus on young people from communities that have long faced barriers to getting in. They work in teams on real projects and build skills and relationships they can carry forward.
That matters in a market that increasingly asks young people to prove what they have done before anyone gives them the chance to do it.
But a program like this cannot be the whole answer, and it should not pretend to be. Youth CivicCorps is a volunteer civic leadership and work-experience program. It is not a substitute for paid employment, and volunteer experience should never become one more hurdle young people must clear before they are considered worth hiring. The bridge matters. The destination is a paying job.
Rebuilding the pathway into work
If the first rung is weakening, the people who can rebuild it are employers, governments, educational institutions and community organizations.
Employers can protect real entry-level roles instead of quietly turning them into jobs that require years of prior experience. Hybrid and remote workplaces can build the onboarding, mentorship and everyday learning that used to happen in person. Work-integrated learning and early-career hiring can expand, especially for young people without professional networks to lean on.
We also need to be honest that a one-size youth strategy will not produce equal outcomes. When Black youth face an unemployment rate above 22 per cent, targeted action on access, discrimination and employer practices is not a side project. It is part of any workforce strategy worth the name.
Young people also need to build the capabilities a changing economy rewards. That includes digital and AI fluency. It also includes the things technology cannot easily replace: judgment, communication, and the ability to work well across differences.
This is where civic leadership and economic opportunity meet. At CivicAction, we believe young people belong in the work of building the future, not only in the conversations about it. Youth CivicCorps gives them a way to take on real challenges in their communities while gaining experience they can use.
CivicAction is not standing outside this problem. We have reactivated our Emerging Leaders Network so that rising leaders across the region can build relationships with one another and take part in policy dialogue we carry to decision-makers, through Policy Jam and other initiatives. Youth CivicCorps sits alongside that work, and we have hired a dedicated manager of outreach and partnerships to build the employer relationships that turn into real placements for young people. This is early work, and only part of what the moment demands, but it is the part we can act on now.
International Youth Day should also put a question to those of us who already hold influence. It is easy to tell young people to network, build skills and stay resilient. The harder question is whether we are making enough room for them to begin.
No generation can climb a ladder if we take away the first rung.