Charlotte Potter didn’t know where to start when she was on the search for a part-time job.
The second-year anthropology student said the hardest thing about her job search was actually handing out resumes.
“I never know how to approach a store and whether to ask a manager or to hand my resume right to the clerk,” Potter said. “What if they just throw it out? That’s my biggest fear.”
Potter is among the many students who face such predicaments. This summer, the unemployment rate for full-time students aged 20-24 was at about 7.1 per cent, according to Statistics Canada.
Those numbers are expected to grow this summer after Human Resources Minister Diane Finley shut down seasonal employment centres that helped students find summer jobs Feb. 29.
An estimated 300 Service Canada student employment centres will be closed, according to Roxanne Dubois, national chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS).
“This has a huge impact, not only because those centres employ students themselves . . . but also because they help students find work in their region and they provide good services in that they help people with their resumé, how to succeed in their resumé, and so on,” Dubois said.
Rebecca Alley, a second-year student at the University of Ottawa, said she also had a difficult time landing a summer job last year. Alley found that all jobs, no matter how basic, required at least some experience, she said.
This is what puts students in a “vicious circle,” Dubois said, where they can’t get a job because they don’t have experience, but they can’t get that experience because coming across a job is difficult.
“Although the government is saying that the bulk of the services that were available in the service centre are available online, you cannot replace a real person with a website when it comes to how to get a job and knowing where those jobs are and that kind of thing,” Dubois said.
Alyson Queen, a spokeswoman for Finley, said the amount of students who use the centres has been declining for a few years and have become “less effective” for students.
“Young Canadians will still be able to receive assistance in person, all year long, through Service Canada locations. However, youth across the country have told us they want to access more government services online,” Queen said in an email. “By enhancing the online features on www.youth.gc.ca, there is no longer the need for these seasonal, temporary locations to be established.”
Although a large number of students may acquire job information online, the government cannot account for the fact that every student across the country is equipped with basic Internet access, Dubois argued.
Students coming from rural areas had better luck with in-person services to help them find jobs in the city that cannot be easily attained otherwise, Dubois said.
“That’s what we’re most concerned about with this announcement, that there is a need for youth and students to have access to services, and . . . these centres did recognize that youth have a specific reality in Canada,” Dubois said. “Now, what we’re being told is that those centres don’t exist anymore and that young people can go to the regular Service Canada centres, which are under resourced and very busy as it is.”
