Mr. Speaker, tomorrow, we will see the latest job numbers from Statistics Canada. It is important to underline the magnitude of the challenge confronting people of all ages, but particularly young people. The unemployment rate has gone up to 7.1%. It has been continually increasing for years, ever since the end of COVID. Youth unemployment has hit 14.5%, which is already at recession levels. In just the last month, we saw a 12% increase in EI claims among working-age women. In the last Statistics Canada job numbers, if we include self-employed people, we had over 100,000 job losses.
It is important to look squarely at this data and say that the government's approach is failing badly when it comes to jobs. We are going to hear in this exchange, as we have, the government congratulating itself for various programs. However, we actually need to see changes in policy that change the result. The intentions of politicians do not matter to Canadians; what matters to Canadians is whether they have a job. Jobs for young people are of critical importance. They set people up on a track to build a career for the future. If they miss those critical early milestones because of a bad economy that hurts young people, it will have an impact that lasts throughout their life.
The Liberal Prime Minister promised to change from the approach taken by his Liberal predecessor, but unfortunately, we have seen the continuation of bad policies and a continuation of the trajectory on unemployment. The only thing that has changed is that things have continued to get worse.
Tonight and tomorrow, as we look at the new job numbers, we are going to hear Liberals talk about how they are going to tinker with subsidy programs. We heard it already tonight from the parliamentary secretary. She talked about the Liberal promise of 6,000 new summer job positions. This is in a context where approaching 20% of returning students did not have a job this summer. We have a population of over two million post-secondary students, and 20% were struggling to find a job this summer.
The government said it was going to subsidize 6,000 more eight-week positions. The average tenure for the summer jobs program is eight weeks, which, by the way, makes no sense. Employers are generally looking for summer jobs where they can employ people throughout the summer but what the government does is it shortens the tenure of those jobs for political reasons. It wants to show how many jobs it created. It uses the same amount of money to create jobs of shorter duration, when it would make much more sense to create jobs of longer duration.
Fundamentally, we are not going to solve the problems that are created by bad economic policy, bad immigration policy and misaligned training policy by subsidizing a few thousand more jobs for eight weeks. We are going to solve this problem by unleashing our economy, by fixing our immigration system and by addressing the gaps in training that have become so acutely problematic. We need wholesale policy change to address the Liberal job loss crisis that has been caused by Liberal policies over the last 10 years. The Liberals have broken their promises on change. They continue, after six months, to deliver more of the same. Over 100,000 jobs have been lost in the last month.
When will the Liberals reverse course so that young people can get back to work?