AI | The 44 North

The Future of Work: What does the workforce look like for young people years from now?

Oct 20

4 min read

by Catherine Mwitta for The 44 North, Contributing Writer - Politics

This article is the second in a series addressing four key challenges the next generation of Ontarians will face: Climate catastrophe, education reform, the housing crisis, and career opportunities.

Editor's Note:

The following article reflects the views & analysis of the author. As with all opinion and essay submissions, the piece has been edited for clarity and reviewed carefully for factual accuracy, but the interpretations & arguments are the author’s own. The 44 North publishes an array of perspectives & voices to encourage and ensure thoughtful engagement with complex social, political, historical, and cultural issues.

In 2022, youth unemployment rates hit a record low. By 2025, 437,000 people aged 15 to 24 were unemployed and looking for work, up 57 percent from 290,000 in 2022. Today, Canada's unemployment rate is at 6.5 percent, up 0.1 percent from Aug 2026. The Canadian economy lost 68,000 jobs in September, 48,000 of those lost among youth aged 15-24. Young people remained unemployed the longest, with teenagers hit hardest.

Such drastic changes could be attributed to government policy shifts, including Parliament raising immigration quotas and loosening restrictions on international students' work weeks. The Fraser Institute argues that an influx of Canadian residents and higher wages have led employers to hire more qualified workers. In 2026, competition has increased as more experienced workers laid off by U.S. tariffs—along with tech companies replacing employees with artificial intelligence (AI)—reenter the job market.

Other factors behind this large loss of youth jobs include reduced entry-level hiring. Many roles labelled as "entry-level" now demand two to five years of prior experience, transforming them into mid-level positions at junior-level pay.

Dispelling myths

It’s false that artificial intelligence is the main contributor to rising youth unemployment. No current evidence shows that adopting AI in the workforce has caused extensive job losses in Canada.

A Statistics Canada survey found that 19.2 percent of Canadian businesses used AI to produce goods or provide services. 25.2 percent of businesses plan to use AI over the next 12 months, up from 10.6 percent in Q3 2024, while 22.1 percent of businesses are unsure about future AI adoption and 52.7 percent do not plan to use it. Only 8 percent of businesses use AI significantly in core operations; 50 percent use it to a low or moderate degree.

AI use in the workplace is still rapidly developing and may have a greater impact on the early-career squeeze in the future. However, the general public’s thoughts on AI at the moment mirror preconceived notions of what society would look like after the Industrial Revolution.

The history of labour in Canada

In the early 19th century, the fur trade and exploitation of Canada’s other natural resources, such as logging and fishing, were the main sources of work besides agriculture. The second industry, the apprenticeship system, accounted for 10 percent of the urban labour force. After the Industrial Revolution, work shifted from producing life’s staples to earning a living; demand for unskilled and skilled workers grew rapidly.

With the rise of factories came the rise of the working class. Boys and girls were expected to work; women and children were paid less than men; long hours were often the primary complaints of factory workers; dangerous working conditions and beatings from employers were commonplace.

During this time, Canada had approximately 165 labour organizations. They campaigned for better working conditions, and workers organized many strikes to improve their rights. By 1956, the Canadian Labour Congress was founded through the merger of two major labour bodies: The Trades and Labour Congress of Canada and the Canadian Congress of Labour. The merger created a single, unified national voice for Canadian workers.

Canada's labour laws have continued to improve since, but some argue the government’s current efforts are not enough.

The future of the job market

Labour unions and the Canadian government may misunderstand Canadians' frustrations with the job market—it’s undergoing another revolution similar to the Industrial Revolution. As such, it feels impossible to guess what the economic landscape will be in a decade. What will “work” look like in the future of transnational employment, labour globalization, and AI integration in the workplace? What shifts will be needed to rebalance the entry-level jobs available to youth, and bring the workplace into equilibrium? Thankfully, the forecasts aren’t hopeless, though change might be a few years away.

The 2025 World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report predicts a decline in cashiers, ticket clerks and other clerical roles, including postal service clerks, bank tellers and data entry clerks. Some existing industries expected to grow the most are farmworkers, delivery drivers, construction workers and salespersons. “Baby Boomers,” the largest and oldest generation of our population, will drive demand for care economy jobs such as nursing, social work, counselling, and personal care aides, which are also expected to grow significantly over the next five years.

World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Survey 2024

Technical, environmentally friendly, and AI-integrated positions will become commonplace on job boards like Indeed. Likewise, the gig economy will replace traditional roles; temporary, freelance, and project-based contracts will allow people to have flexible careers across multiple industries.

In the near future, youth applying for jobs could consider roles in healthcare as personal support workers, nurse practitioners, and mental health professionals. The second industry to expand in the coming years is tech. In post-secondary school, teens could consider specializing in Cybersecurity and AI for long-term career security. Lastly, Natural Resources Canada projects 130,000 additional job openings in electricity and renewable energy between 2028 and 2050, such as solar and wind power, which will be another industry for young people to look for work stability.

The most positive shifts in the job market will hopefully be workplace flexibility, which shapes how, when and where people work; skills-based hiring, which connects workers to more opportunities based on their abilities rather than traditional credentials; and lifelong, continuous learning for long-term career growth.

In part three of this four-part series looking into the future, I’ll be diving into Canada’s environmental future and how climate change will impact young Canadian’s livelihoods.

Catherine Mwitta has a bachelor’s in creative writing from Kwantlen Polytechnic University and a certification in Journalism from Langara College. She is an editor at Augur Magazine and INKspire. Likewise, bylines at Stir Vancouver, SAD Mag, This Magazine, C Magazine and Bluffs Monitor.

The Gift Writers Give: What AI Can’t Do

Catherine Mwitta

Apr 21

5 min read

by Catherine Mwitta for The 44 North, Contributing Writer - Politics

**An orange-hued image of a page with handwriting on it. A modern quill is resting on the page.**

"Burnout became inevitable, and writing fiction became a hustle rather than a creative art form. This pace of creation wasn’t sustainable, but unfortunately, something else appeared to be."

When I was ten years old, I gathered sheets of printing paper to write stories whenever I found myself daydreaming. I remember the first time I wanted to write. Maybe I was bored, and writing kept me busy. Or rather, I was moved by novels, magic, and life in such a way that only writing could help me respond; help me wake up without leaving a dream.

As I grew older, writing became an activity I returned to in my free time. Everyone turns to writing for different reasons, but each—no matter the form—is connected to a core desire to distill and share our relationship with the world around us. I didn’t start publishing my work until I was much older, and decided I wanted to pursue a career in writing, but I never lost sight of that very human feeling, propelling my words across the page: Being Seen.

For a long time, choosing writing as a career was discouraged based on income. According to a 2022 Authors Guild survey, referenced in Publishers Weekly, established full-time authors earn $23,329 a year—up 21% from 2018. The job site Indeed.com says authors in the United States earn on average $52,625 per year, which translates to $22.57 per hour. Change the search to “Writer,” and these numbers climb to $70,641 and $30.24, respectively.

These numbers are well-known and circulated, but even so, many writers, including me, see writing as an opportunity to escape the rat race of a nine-to-five job. Yet, unbeknownst to most (myself included), pivoting to a writing career means entering a whole other race. Another, perhaps unanticipated change was on the horizon.

The rise of indie/self-publishing technology and markets.

During the digital revolution, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) launched in 2007. This technological innovation allowed anyone to publish a novel without having to bypass the well-guarded gates of traditional publishing. For much of the early and mid-2000s, self-publishing was a surefire way to bar yourself from traditional publication, often seen as a last resort for frequently slush pile-rejected writers. This all changed during the pandemic.

Around this time, indie/self-publishing by writers increased exponentially (Vancouver Sun, Self-publishing Advisor, EA Books Publishing). Publishers no longer catered to their mid-list-tier authors, resulting in lower advances and a lack of marketing that often prevented them from recouping already abysmal advances to earn royalties as passive income. KDP offers a 30 percent to 70 percent ratio on royalties, an enticing upside considering traditional publishers offer a 15 percent split after factoring in literary agents (who take another 15 percent of the cut).

Writers opted for self-publishing over traditional publishing due to its high return on investment. They uploaded digital novels to Kindle and advertised them to readers through social media ads. The biggest bestsellers were (are) romance novels, and many indie-published writers made six figures writing Romantasy and now dark romance.

Becoming a full-time writer was more accessible and possible than ever before. But, as always, there were conditions: Authors had to release at least three to four books a year to meet readership demands, and marketing became a side job, considering most “self-pubbed” authors didn't have the same connections as “trad-pubs.” Burnout became inevitable, and writing fiction became a hustle rather than a creative art form. This pace of creation wasn’t sustainable, but unfortunately, something else appeared to be.

The Indie & self-publishing demand meet generative AI.

Why spend years on a novel when you could write solely to generate income and pump out a book within an hour?

In the New York Times piece, “The New Fabio Is Claude: The romance industry, always at the vanguard of technological change, is rapidly adapting to A.I. Not everyone is on board,” romance novelist Coral Hart stated that she used to write 10-12 novels per year. Her output is now 200 novels per year using generative AI.

**A phone with AI apps on a dark screen.**

“If I can generate a book in a day, and you need six months to write a book, who’s going to win the race?” Hart said.

Readers debate the quality of Hart’s books, but what’s certain is that she’s sold around 50,000 copies and currently earns six figures.

Traditional publishers have also recognized the profitability of AI, much like how many of them have now recognized the profitability of signing bestselling self-published authors, rather than cultivating submissions from their slush piles. In 2024, HarperCollins inked a deal with an unknown AI company to train their models on non-fiction books, and last year announced plans to use AI for translations, deciding to replace employees with tech. Regarding content creation, many readers contend that Silver Elite by Dani Francis (a pen name) was an AI-written novel, and that the Hachette-acquired book Shygirl by Mia Ballard was as well.

As AI-generated books flood the market, I wonder when readers will no longer be able to tell whether a book was written by a large language model or by a human. I fear that day is soon. But even so, writing isn’t dead. Writers have and will continue to tell the stories closest to their hearts. We just have to look for them—and listen. And personally, quality over quantity not only matters most, but shows.

For example, Tomi Adeyemi signed a six-figure book and movie deal with Henry Holt and Co. (BYR), an imprint of Macmillan Publishers, for her first novel, Children of Blood and Bone. Jill Bearup has sold over 54,468 copies of her book Just Stab Me Now since its release in 2024, published by an independent press. Adeyemi wrote a West African-inspired YA fantasy, uncommon in 2018, and Bearup wrote a meta fantasy novel about an author’s characters acting out-of-character, a book no publisher knew how to sell. These two authors have done well in the publishing market because they chose to write deeply personal stories.

When I feel I could be writing stories faster, or worse, that I’m not writing for market trends, I come back to my core beliefs and values: I don’t use AI for research, writing, or editing. The stories I write come from a part of me. Likewise, synthesizing what I hope to communicate to an audience during revisions is just as important to me as the final copy. All aspects of writing challenge me as a human, and as a reader, books do the same.

What AI can’t do isn’t profitable. Maybe that’s a good thing.

As Western society pushes for more efficiency and higher profit margins, I continue to search for how to exist within this system.

AI might be able to move me deeply as a reader, but it can’t expand my worldview. Anthropic recently settled a lawsuit over the illegal use of pirated books to train Claude, widely regarded as one of the better generative AI applications. Human experiences are not singular, and large language models can only replicate preexisting ideas.

And thus, the greatest gift a writer can ever give a reader is the ability to think differently.

Reckoning with Violence from Safety

Emerson Prentice

Apr 8

4 min read

by Emerson Prentice for The 44 North, Contributing Writer - Politics

***A Map of the Middle East with a pin on Iran***

"News has seeped into frequented apps like TikTok and Instagram. The war has become inescapable while remaining unreachable. And, like all global citizens, we’re asked to take a stance. Gen Z is dealing with a strange alternate reality of wartime—we’re deeply aware of what is happening because of its prevalence on our devices, but we’re also unbelievably removed from it."

From here, we may be safe.

Despite threats of potential drone warfare in California and rising gas prices, my college campus and the college campuses of America are not warzones—they’ve remained relatively insulated.

Biking on paved paths, business seems to be running as usual, never mind the air raids that began on Feb. 28 in the Middle East. Classes are still on, finals abound. Any real threat of violence a student feels on campus is most likely an inflated one. This is all true from where I stand in Palo Alto.

For schools in the Middle East, for one girls’ elementary school in particular, safety isn’t guaranteed. Desks proved to be no match for bombs.

American college students are utterly protected from this type of violence by nature. Some students do come to American universities from countries riddled with warfare. For domestic students, though, we cannot reckon with the unimaginable because we cannot reckon with what we will never hear, smell, or feel. The violence is all painfully distant, truly unknowable.

And at the same time, our generation sees violence more than any generation has before because of the rise of technology. In many ways, we are far more aware of war than those before us. As the conflict in the Middle East has pushed on for weeks, our eyes are glued to our screens, and our screens are filled with carnage. It creates an unsettling juxtaposition between the lives of students in America and the lives of students on battlefields.

News has seeped into frequented apps like TikTok and Instagram. The war has become inescapable while remaining unreachable. And, like all global citizens, we’re asked to take a stance. Gen Z is dealing with a strange alternate reality of wartime—we’re deeply aware of what is happening because of its prevalence on our devices, but we’re also unbelievably removed from it.

So how does our generation deal with it? What is the rational response to what you know is distant injustice?

College campuses have seen protests about this conflict and others. Students circulate Instagram infographics with percentages and standalone quotes to convey lives lost. We hold fleeting, often unserious conversations about how “Iran is going to bomb us.” These are in many ways ill-informed and shallow, but their existence and prevalence assure that the conflict remains in the cultural conversation. Without the posts and posters, how would our generation even know it was happening? Wouldn’t our lives feel untouched?

College administrations, adults, and professors have a profound and accurate sense that youth cannot grasp what is happening in the Middle East and in most global conflicts. Older generations scoff that students are chanting slogans we cannot understand.

Truthfully, as we are attempting to reckon with what is happening in relation to our unaffected lives, we’re untangling what these conflicts mean in a wider historical sense. Without the necessary background knowledge, is it our responsibility to stay quiet? Or are we still obligated to speak up no matter how much we know?

The easiest and safest answer to these questions for bustling college students is, of course, the most common response from anyone—silence and ignorance. Our focus should by definition be our education during our time on campus. It’s exceedingly easy to write over any other civic responsibilities with heavy courseloads, but also somewhat essential.

The same importance of education could be said for the students of the bombed elementary school in Iran—the conflict was not something the young girls should have felt concerned with, and yet violence for them was shockingly inseparable from their place of schooling. They did not have the privilege to choose to escape it, while American students do. So what are American students meant to do with that privilege?

Notably, this ease of ignorance is not the same for all university students. Some have families that are directly impacted by this violence. Some have homes they do not know the stability or existence of anymore.

It’s a blessing to not have to reckon with war—it’s an underappreciated privilege my generation was born with. But it creates a complex situation for us as students. One of the most popular majors at my university is international relations, and political science majors graduate from colleges across the country every year. For these students in particular, forming a complex and deep understanding of war is imperative. Students interested in fields like engineering or computer science may also go on to work at companies like Palantir, which are deeply implicated in war.

An education on a safe campus can and should never be fully separated from an understanding of war.

These complex questions of what Gen Z should be doing during a war that isn’t theirs are ones the students of America are asking themselves every day—and rightfully so. They’re important questions to help us develop as global citizens and community members, to deepen our understanding of what we owe each other.

Even more, questioning is a quintessential aspect of maturing as a young person—it’s how we grapple with the world we were thrown into.

The truth is, we simply don’t have the answers to these questions. However, we can still respond. As the youth of America, we certainly have the courage, tenacity, and time to continue struggling through the work of questioning. This work, especially in colleges and universities, is precisely what we have to offer right now. And as we’ve seen in movements across U.S. campuses, youth voices—fully informed or not—are undeniably catalysts for change.

Emerson Prentice is a Freshman at Stanford studying Anthropology. At school, she is the Campus Life desk editor for the Stanford Daily, a DJ for the campus radio station KZSU, and an associate producer for the Stanford Storytelling Project’s award-winning podcast, “State of the Human.” For fun, Emerson also loves to run, cook, and birdwatch!

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