Ottawa will spend $880 million over five years on paid, four-month work placements meant to move young Canadians into the skilled trades, Jobs Minister Patty Hajdu announced Friday, as new federal labour data show youth unemployment is still running well above pre-pandemic levels.
The Team Canada Strong Youth Placements program is open to Canadians aged 15 to 30 and is designed to give participants hands-on experience in construction and trades occupations before they move into a registered apprenticeship, according to Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC). Placements are expected to begin in early 2027, and employers and community organizations that want to host one must submit an expression of interest to the federal government by Oct. 23, the department said in Friday’s announcement.
“Young people want the opportunity to contribute and be part of building a stronger Canada,” Hajdu said in the government’s news release.
Friday’s rollout fills in details of a program Prime Minister Mark Carney first sketched out in April, when he unveiled the broader $6-billion Team Canada Strong plan to recruit, train and hire up to 100,000 new Red Seal certified trades workers by 2030-31. Ottawa has since folded that plan into an $8-billion skilled trades push flagged in the spring economic update, with the youth placements as its single largest new spending line.
Alongside the placements, the government is launching a Build Canada Apprenticeship Service this fall to connect job seekers with small and medium-sized employers, who can claim up to $10,000 toward a first-year apprentice’s wages. A $5,000 completion bonus will go to apprentices who earn Red Seal certification on or after April 1, 2025, and a $400 weekly top-up to Employment Insurance will help cover lost income during in-class technical training starting next spring. Ottawa has also earmarked $2 billion for provinces and territories to expand pre-apprenticeship and technical training, though how quickly that money flows remains under discussion with each jurisdiction, according to Global News.
Neither Friday’s announcement nor ESDC’s program page spells out exactly how many placements the $880 million will fund or what participants will be paid during their four months on the job, only that the work is paid. Those are the practical questions young applicants and the employers weighing whether to host them will need answered before the program opens for placements next year.
The announcement lands as Statistics Canada’s latest labour force survey put the unemployment rate for Canadians aged 15 to 24 at 12.9 per cent in August, up slightly from July but down from 14.3 per cent a year earlier. Even with that improvement, youth joblessness remains well above the 10.8 per cent average recorded in the three years before the pandemic, and the rate for students job hunting over the summer stayed above 15 per cent.
The government has also built equity considerations into the placements’ design. ESDC materials list Indigenous youth, Black youth, other racialized youth, 2SLGBTQI+ people and youth with disabilities as priority groups for the program, and pair the placements with wraparound supports such as transportation subsidies, mental health services and child-care assistance meant to remove barriers that have historically kept some young people out of the trades altogether.
Even a fully subscribed program has a scale problem to contend with. Ottawa’s own estimate puts skilled trades job openings at 1.4 million between 2024 and 2033 as retiring tradespeople leave the workforce, meaning the 100,000-worker goal behind Team Canada Strong covers roughly seven per cent of that gap. That math is likely why the government is pairing the new placements with wage top-ups, completion bonuses and employer incentives rather than counting on placements alone to close it.
Via Global News and The Canadian Press. Read the original coverage.
