Minister, we know that federal programs like the Youth Employment and Skills Strategy provide valuable short-term job opportunities. However, the data remains worrying. The number of youth not in employment, education or training, otherwise known as NEET, is increasing, and youth unemployment remains structurally high.

Simultaneously, businesses across the country are reporting a severe skills mismatch and are struggling to fill hundreds of thousands of critical high-paying jobs in trades, technology and health care. This suggests that simply increasing short-term placements is not building the career foundations that young Canadians or businesses need or want.

Minister, beyond the successful but temporary Canada Summer Jobs model, what national, long-term economic strategy will your department implement to address the country’s high‑demand sectors while ensuring that young Canadians are not just getting a job but getting a sustainable career pathway across every region of Canada?

Thank you for that question. Your Honour, it is incredibly relevant that the senator speaks about data.

Yet again, the challenge is that provincial data does not match up with federal data, and we continue to experience data gaps, which is why the Prime Minister’s announcement during part of a tariff announcement was to create sector alliances. “Sector alliances” is somewhat of a boring name, I would say, for an exciting concept. What it does is to bring provinces and territories together with trainers, unions, colleges and universities, and, indeed, stakeholder representation from a variety of sectors to understand better what the needs are going to be for that sector and to better align training and opportunities for young people with what the sector is demanding.

This is something that both employers and unions have been calling for, for a long time. Right now, we are in the process of designing those sectors. I am excited to let you know that there will be a sector alliance in the care economy, in reference to the previous question, which is so important, because often care is the limiter for many other people’s ambitions in a variety of different occupations.

Minister, I will take “boring” if it means progress. To that point, the Organisation for Economic Co‑operation and Development, or OECD, and International Labour Organization, or ILO, both identified public outcome dashboards as a gold standard for program accountability. With that in mind, will your government establish a Canadian national outcomes framework and a public dashboard that track labour market metrics so that Canadians can clearly see whether federal youth employment programs and investments are building real long‑term career pathways rather than pathways to short-term paycheques?

Thank you, Your Honour. That is an excellent question and idea. I would say that there are spaces where we are able to track investments, for example, through labour market transfer agreements and workforce development agreements that provide about $3 billion a year to provinces and territories for skills training. We have agreements with provinces and territories to be able to track earnings and earning outcomes through social insurance number data. Obviously, it’s very important to understand how those transfers result in better skills for Canadians.

To the point you are making regarding investments directly from the federal government, I agree that we can do a better job to ensure that the roughly $1.2 billion in this budget, for example, that will be focused on youth-specific skills opportunities and training —