Why Stephen Poloz’s advice for young Canadians is so totally wrong: Salutin [View all]

Finance minister Joe Oliver chimed in unhelpfully saying the young face a Catch-22 since you can’t get the experience you need if you don’t already have some. Ergo take the free work. Sorry, Joe, but no. They’ve tried that. Plus they’re probably temping to scrounge enough for rent and coffee — as “associates” in retail or hospitality, say, where they get inflated titles in lieu of decent wages. They work while they work to find work.

My own response to hearing the young talk about this is mostly sadness — at their inclination to take the burden of responsibility on themselves. They assume they haven’t done enough, maybe they should check those listings once more, pad the resumé a tad, volunteer again. This in turn opens the way for “life coaches” who reinforce the sense that it’s all your personal failure. Meanwhile those with resources to seriously expand the job market keep cutting jobs instead. This week Scotiabank slashed 1500, after “sky-high” profits.

You know what really scars the young? Being betrayed by an older generation with the power and position to affect the forces that affect them, who say instead to work for free and maybe, eventually, it might work out.

This week I attended a gala for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and happened to meet Jean-Pierre Kingsley. He’s a brave bureaucrat, former boss at Elections Canada. He fought lengthy battles with Stephen Harper over integrity in the voting process. Others with guts, like budget officer Kevin Page and StatsCan head Munir Sheikh, are gone too and replaced by ciphers (or worse) such as Poloz. But, like The Doctor in Doctor Who, those guys managed to regenerate after an earlier generation of high-level civil servants went over to the dark side. The question is, How many regenerations do they have in them?

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2014/11/06/why_stephen_polozs_advice_for_young_canadians_is_so_totally_wrong_salutin.html