Not long ago, Casey McLaughlin was executive director of the Yukon Transportation Museum in Whitehorse, but earlier this month she found herself lining up with hundreds of others at a job fair in Ottawa, vying for a coveted position at a new Food Basics grocery store.
“I’m willing to go from being a boss to shelving vegetables because you have to pay the bills,” she said. “It’s really hard to find a job in Ottawa right now.”
Nafisa Ijie also attended the job fair at a hotel in Barrhaven, despite having a master’s degree and experience working as a business analyst in Nigeria and England.
“It’s been very difficult getting a job, especially when you don’t have the Canadian work experience. So you just have to start off somewhere,” said Ijie, who arrived in Canada a little over a year ago.
According to Statistics Canada, unemployment rose to 7.1 per cent in August, the highest rate since May 2016, excluding the pandemic years.
Viet Vu, manager of economic research at The Dais, a public policy think-tank at Toronto’s Metropolitan University, said that doesn’t necessarily mean Canadians are losing their jobs — but nor are employers creating many new ones.
“A lot of companies are not firing, people are not laying off their workers,” Vu explained.
“[But] because of the trade uncertainty, because of the slackening of the labour market, a lot of companies are hesitant to invest in expansion, in creating new positions.”
That’s what makes events like the Food Basics job fair so rare — and so attractive, even to those who might be over-qualified to work at a grocery store.
For young people, finding work is an extra struggle. According to Statistics Canada, student unemployment is at its highest since 2009.
“Canada is not helping no one, bro. Like, you see the whole line right now? It’s a whole big line,” said Hasan Alhamid, 17, gesturing at the long queue of job seekers waiting to drop off their resumés.
“I see a lot of people in the line. So I’m a little bit nervous,” agreed another student, Ryan Ismael, 20.
Vu said when employers halt expansion, entry-level positions are often the first to go, and that “hurts young people the most.”
Canadian research has shown that for young people especially, being unemployed in a weak economy can have a persistent negative effect on their earning potential for years to come — a well-studied phenomenon known as wage scarring.
“We’ve faced much higher levels of youth unemployment before in the ’80s and the ’90s,” Vu said. “But this is not yet the time to panic, because this is the economy functioning as it should during a weaker time.”
In a statement to CBC, Food Basics confirmed it received hundreds of applications in Ottawa for just 125 positions.
McLaughlin, the former museum director, was not among the lucky ones.
“They phoned and they’re like, ‘No, you’re just not what we’re looking for,'” McLaughlin told CBC later. “I’m like, ‘Please, I’ll just take the garbage out, I don’t care. I need to pay bills.'”
McLaughlin, who said she’s been hunting for a job for five months and has twins to care for, said she’s considering moving to Western Canada to try her luck there.
“You kind of have to push your pride back,” she said. “All that life experience you have and what you can bring to the table, you kind of have to put it to the side.”
Vu said a brief period of unemployment following a job loss is to be expected.
“We usually expect that people who lose a job or who switch job takes anywhere from three to six months to find their next opportunity,” he said. “Anything longer than that, and especially those unemployed for more than a year, we should be concerned about.”
With September’s labour statistics coming out in days, Vu said to expect more of the same, at least for now.
“My guess is we’re not going to see much difference from the trend line that we have been seeing, which is a much weaker levels of economic activities, a slightly elevated level of unemployment, lower-than-expected hiring and for layoffs to, at least for now, remain steady.”
