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

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.

Photograph by mana5280

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. 

Via the Fraser Institute

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. 

https://youtu.be/wgprVI62ckc?si=0gvyrJWu9xKmI_f7

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.

---

Letter from the Editor-in-Chief: The Freedom Not to Think

by Gillian Smith-Clark, ​for The 44 North, Editor-in-Chief

"Spring Greening Along The River" by Pat Katz

As I ran alongside the riverbank on a clear, crisp fall afternoon in my new city, following a dirt path through a canopy of trees just beginning to turn colour, I should have felt relaxed. Instead, the moment when I normally let go, letting the music from my headphones seep into my consciousness and my mind drift and clear, didn’t come.

My thoughts were jumbled and scattered—moving between the beauty of my surroundings, whether I was alone on the trail, the warmth of the sun, and: How safe is it to run alone here?

That particular section of the trail was a paradox. Covered in foliage and sheltered from view of the nearby road, what made it so lovely was also what made it potentially dangerous. An acquaintance had recently reminded me of a murder that occurred decades ago, somewhere along this riverbank. How safe is it now? Should I have an alarm or pepper spray? Should I not be wearing a ponytail, because someone could jump out of the bushes and grab it? How long would it take for someone to get to me if I were attacked and screamed?

Am I overreacting, overthinking? Maybe.

Images of the men in my life, past and present, filled my head. Some were rolling their eyes. I wanted to let my mind drift. I wanted to turn up the volume on my music and daydream, but I couldn’t.

The memory of Alyssa Lokits surfaces—a horrific story that happened on a trail not unlike this one. With a shiver, I wonder how far I am from the paved trail and more people.

What lingered after that run was not whether I was overthinking the situation, but the fact that the calculations had to happen at all. Alongside that was another uncomfortable realization: How many years of my life have contained a similar mental calculus—the times when I got it right, and the moments when I realized I’d made a costly error.

Some of us move through the world carrying questions daily that others rarely have to ask; still others inherit forms of watchfulness so embedded in our psyches that we barely notice the effort they require.

That idea—of attention, and of who is required to pay it—runs quietly through many of the pieces in this issue. What do we learn to notice? What are we afforded the freedom not to think about? And once something enters our awareness, what responsibility follows?

"The Meewasin Trail" by Pat Katz

“Braiding a Ladder” is a pivotal piece, bringing together three different but equally powerful perspectives on modern-day misogyny. At its heart is a question about what happens when the burden of noticing misogyny is disproportionately carried by the people most likely to experience its consequences. Women are often asked to remain alert to risk, to recognize warning signs, to modify our behaviour, to protect ourselves, to explain what happened afterward. But what changes when the work of paying attention is more widely shared? When men look more closely at the language, assumptions, jokes, behaviours and systems around them, and begin to ask what responsibility follows from what they see?

The same movement from attention to awareness to responsibility appears elsewhere in this issue, although in very different forms.

Our Artist Spotlight takes an unexpected turn this issue, placing Earth itself at the centre. In “Earth is the Artist,” memory, land, family history, displacement, grief and environmental harm become tangled together. The piece asks us to look differently at something we so often relegate to the background: The ground beneath us. What changes when the Earth is not scenery, property, or resource, but witness and maker; something that carries memory, bears wounds, and responds to what we ask it to absorb?

Wardah Malik’s essay on tradwife and girlboss culture turns that same act of attention inward. Her question—are our desires truly our own?—is deceptively simple. The lifestyles we imagine we’ve freely chosen do not emerge in a vacuum; they’re shaped by economics, gender expectations, cultural narratives, algorithms, and the particular forms of security or escape available to us at a given moment. What feels entirely personal may also carry the fingerprints of forces we have stopped noticing.

Elsewhere in the issue, attention becomes an act of care. “The Wake of the Nepal Flash Floods: Keeping Each Other Alive” looks at what remains when catastrophe strips away the illusion of self-sufficiency. Our conversation with Rohit Doel asks us to distinguish between grief, loneliness, and isolation within disabled friendships rather than flattening different experiences into one. And Fernn Eastman’s “From Feeding Tube to Paramedic: Your Body Is Not Your Enemy” turns toward the intimate work of learning to inhabit the body differently.

These pieces are not making the same argument, nor are the experiences they explore equivalent. But together, they ask us to look beneath the surface of what’s immediately visible—at the assumptions, histories, systems, desires, memories, and burdens that sit just underneath ordinary life. 

At its core, this is an issue about freedom and what that means: The freedom not to think, the cost of constant attention, and the responsibility that begins when we finally notice.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Warmly,

Gillian Smith-Clark

Editor-in-Chief, The 44 North Media

Poet’s Corner: Two Poems from “Broken Lines: A Gathering of Exiled Poets” curated by Laura Kraftowitz & Edward Salem for Poetry Magazine

by Mikaela Brewer ​for The 44 North, Senior Editor

“In the Bathroom” by Raafat Hekmat, translated by Zyad Altaghlbi, and “A Timeline of Exile” by Maryam Ala Amjadi appear in “Broken Lines: A Gathering of Exiled Poets,” curated by Laura Kraftowitz & Edward Salem. Read the whole folio in the July/August 2026 issue of Poetry.

Artwork by Logan Brewer

Note: These poems are not in the public domain! Please use the link above to read them. 

A few months ago, I came across Maryam Ala Amjadi’s poem, “A Timeline of Exile,” and Raafat Hekmat’s poem, “In the Bathroom” (translated by Zyad Altaghlbi), via Poetry Magazine’s folio featuring exiled poets. As Iranian and Syrian writers, respectively, their words have a particular heft now. 

Laura Kraftowitz and Edward Salem, who curated this folio, wrote in their introduction that each of the ten contemporary poets has “faced persecution, war, or genocide, as well as threats to their safety because of their writing.” In both poems, we visit the private places that these experiences burrow into the body and soul.

The lines in “A Timeline of Exile” wind and spill as the bloodline does. That first stanza brings everything in it to a “a single trembling point”—a question mark, line break, and stanza break simultaneously. How much more could a line tremble with what it holds and holds up? Later, we face that question, at least in part: What is the difference between red versus black and white lines? The poem posits this by noting both, but doesn’t quite ask or answer it. The ‘point’ is where everything starts: The red lines are crossed, whereas the words ‘border,’ ‘black,’ and ‘white’ imply impervious binaries and blockages. A border “can’t” be transgressed without moving from one ‘state’ to the other, irreversibly in time. The vulnerability of the assured readiness, addressed to a ‘you,’ is stark and frightening, but steadfast. It trembles, but it doesn’t hesitate, which threads through Hekmat’s poem. 

“In the Bathroom” shows us the preciousness of privacy and a longing to escape surveillance. There’s desperation, too, in the employment of bits of cotton or chewing gum to plug holes. And still that trembling, reverberating from Iran to Syria. Hekmat can’t guarantee privacy in this bathroom, and even if he could, would the body believe it enough to process it as such? This is trauma: The em dash points like a sniper gun with a zoomed-in visual from somewhere he can’t distinctly identify. In other words, the threat is everywhere. 

Ovid in Exile. 9.46 x 12.50 cm oil on canvas by J.M.W. Turner

This poem also tethers nakedness—literally and metaphorically—to threat. To move within the range of hatred, control, and continued colonial violence is terrifying as the reach of eyes, weapons, and surveillance only seems to expand. The poem itself seems to be fighting to move within the range of anything else, to believe that it can one day live outside the range of the sniper, shell, or nearby explosion. And by the poem’s existence alone, it both does and doesn’t.

Together, these poems consider: Can we cross any line, whether through sacrifice, bravery, or safety, that’s far enough away or a sturdy enough door? Will that crossing ever feel far or safe enough in this world? How are these questions different for Maryam Ala Amjadi, Raafat Hekmat, me, and you?

And how does reading poetry help?

The trauma always lingers, forever the remainder in war’s cruel long division. “Broken Lines,” as the folio is titled, can refer to everything from lineages/ancestry, those crossed in protest, borders crossed in escape, taboos and the perseverance of derogatory names/stereotypes, tethers to worlds/lives, bones, healthy attachments to body/place, and ultimately, the line breaks of poems as poets write through real-life enjambment.

By reading these poets, we bear witness. We see language, craft, choices, and reality. We feel the draw of hope rather than despair, and how everyone has lines to break—lines that will allow us to build something like a poem in real life. That crossing, perhaps.

In tandem, I’d love to recommend Transient Worlds (Copper Canyon Press, 2026) by the current U.S. Poet Laureate, Arthur Sze, and Poem-a-Day’s translation-focused curation, woven together by Maya C. Popa—a dear mentor—for September. Translation, of course, is in conversation with exile, war, borders and the way language can face them. My favourite is Nikola Madzirov’s “Silence Comes Somewhere Else,” about which he writes what feels like a perfect closing to this short essay:

 “Absence is not silent. Poetry is the archaeology of unburied memories. Often, in my dreams, I see my dead mother coming home with bags full of fruit, while I run towards the apricot orchards. The scars of the unsaid appear on our faces while we sleep. My father still uses [my mother’s] old toothbrush to clean the edges of her picture frame on the gravestone and the letters of his own name engraved beside hers. This is his way of feeling more alive … like a poet trying to revise his already published poems, to create a new history.”