While COVID-19 has slammed on the entire country’s brakes, this sudden stop has been as severe for Canada’s youth as nearly any other group. Young people across the country are working and living in some of the most precarious situations. Many have been halted in the middle of transitional periods, forced to forgo some newly found independence, or struggle on without even the meagre resources older Canadians have accumulated.
This is the second global economic recession/depression in these young lives. With outrageous home prices across the country, rapidly accumulating student debt, and an unbelievably uncertain job market, the future is bleak for young workers and students, and this is taking a toll on the mental health of all youth in Canada.
Work
Even before COVID-19, the global economy was speeding towards a recession, and the subsequent months have seen a serious depression. For Canadian youth, in real terms, this means a ~25 percent unemployment rate as of July 2020. With jobs drying up across nearly all sectors, even jobs typically available to young people, like fast food, retail, and manual labour, will become increasingly competitive, as laid off adults scramble to find any employment they can.
It’s also becoming increasingly clear that the federal government isn’t going to play saviour here. As made evident by the Liberal WE scheme to pay student “volunteers” below minimum wage, Canadian federal leadership views this massive stockpile of youth labour as an easily exploitable group of desperate workers, rather than a valuable asset to put towards economic recovery and individual skills development.
Study
Like young workers, students are facing uncharted waters, in a new school year unlike any before. The past decade has seen skyrocketing tuition and student debt, with the average nationwide debt for the graduating class of 2015-2016 of $13,306 (Stats Canada). The 2020-2021 school year will incorporate radical structural changes to accompany this financial strain. Nearly all Canadian higher learning institutions will be operating purely online, throwing students and instructors into a hellish, alien, learning Zoomscape. Adding insult to injury, these distance video lectures will cost the same as regular classes, in spite of a general concern from professors that distance learning is a far inferior process and product.
These issues with distance learning are far more pronounced for the thousands of international students than universities. Universities, desperate for their higher tuition fees, while governments have cut support for education, have sought to attract and retain these students. From concerns with border closures to their lack of support structures in Canada, international students are even more likely to suffer the effects of distance learning during a pandemic. When taken as a whole, the impact of COVID-19 on Canadian universities will likely be felt far into the future, with administrations across the country looking at the closure of physical campuses as a method for saving maintenance and utility expenses, along with the salaries of those who keep Canadian campuses running.
Mental Health
The country is facing an unprecedented mental health crisis, including but not limited to economic, social, pandemical, technological, and obviously psychological factors, which will come down in full force on Canadian youth.
Along with immediate causes to deterioration of mental health, such as being forced back into childhood homes for quarantine and prolonged physical isolation from their peers, there is a more generalized mental health strain on younger generations. Generation Z, in particular, have an understanding that the global capitalist class, wringing the natural world of its resources, has burdened youth with catastrophic climate problems that the guilty parties won’t live to see play out.
Whether it is a job market that is neither effective or efficient, educational institutions with a hand in their wallets and little care for quality education, or the climate crisis, Canada’s youngest generations have been betrayed by capitalism and are quickly realizing that socialism is the only path forward to a future planet that is at least habitable, let alone equitable.
