Young Canadians earn less and work under worse conditions - StatsCan

In a report released on Monday (December 5), Statistics Canada revealed that young professionals nationwide have been labouring under far worse conditions than their counterparts in other generations, with the youth unemployment rate over a period of 4 decades (from 1976 to 2015) being around 2.3 times higher than than the rate among workers older than 25 years old.

Less young Canadians are also working in full-time positions today than in 1976, StatsCan added.

These trends accompanied a severe weakening in purchasing power in this cohort by the early 1980s, with young Canadian males (17 to 24 years old) experiencing a 15 per cent drop in their real hourly wages, and young females suffering a 10 per cent decline.

StatsCan noted that even the housing and petroleum boom from 2004 to 2009 was not enough to offset these developments, The Canadian Press reported.

Experts have warned that this continued crippling of the millennial home buying market might topple the whole edifice of the Canadian real estate sector.

In a recent interview, UBC School of Population policy professor Paul Kershaw and York University finance professor Moshe Milevsky cautioned that the prohibitive prices today—which have prevented a significant portion of the young consumer base from getting into home ownership—will trigger a domino effect that might culminate into a major economic headache for everyone.

“If people stop making initial acquisitions there is a possibility that further sales and other parts of the retail sector will slow down and then that will have an impact on the price people can sell their homes,” Kershaw said.

“The last thing we want is to be a commodity labour market. What's stopped us from doing that is the connections we've had to our community. If the younger generation sees housing as unaffordable and uninteresting they're more likely to move internationally,” Milevsky agreed.

MBN

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