03. YOUNG PEOPLE SEE FEW REAL GAINS FROM "ECONOMIC BOOM"

YOUNG PEOPLE SEE FEW REAL GAINS FROM "ECONOMIC BOOM"

(The following article is from the November 16-30, 2007 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St. Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.

Guest editorial by Johan Boyden, General Secretary of the Young Communist League of Canada

November's headlines are pumping-up Canada's current great economic boom. But you don't have to look very far too see youth aren't benefitting very much.

     Partly, the latest employment numbers are inflated. One third of the new jobs were hires from Ontario's October provincial election. The biggest employment gains are a 7% rise since January for workers 55 and over. But for workers 25 to 54, the increase is just 1.2%, as the economy continues to kill well paying, unionized manufacturing jobs.

     Similarly, youth 15 to 24 have only seen a 1.6% employment rate gain. Full time youth jobs are actually shrinking. Many of the new part-time, jobs are also low-paid and dangerous. One in every four injured workers in Canada are youth.

     Corporations demand a university-educated workforce, but it's students and taxpayers who foot that bill. Over two-thirds of today's 18 to 24 year-olds are in post-secondary, and about half of these students work. The 2007 Auditor General report says that almost a million Canadian students are in debt as tuition costs skyrocket. Student campaigns have won tuition freezes and roll-backs in some provinces, slowing the rise in undergraduate fees to 2.8% this year - but special fees are dramatically climbing. The average student now pays $663 in special fees, StatsCan says. Is it any surprise a Decima research poll last spring indicated over 30% of Canadians share the demand championed by the Young Communist League, to eliminate tuition fees?

     While you might think low interest rates would benefit students, Canadian student loan interest rates are set above prime! Continued low interest rates actually hurt young Canadians, forcing them to start saving early to build a nest-egg like Mum and Dad - but it's money most young people don't have.

     Youth homelessness is now a common trend. Today, youth account for a third of Canada's homeless. Even in Fort McMurray, Alberta, heartland of Canada's resource boom, there are homeless youth, but no emergency housing. Poverty and lack of affordable housing increasingly drive homelessness today, a crisis which earned condemnation last month by UN Special Rapporteur Miloon Kothari, who called for a "radical shift in government policy" towards housing.
     But this is not the direction Canada is heading. With the Speech from the Throne, we're locked into a dangerous and expensive war-mongering foreign policy, and more tax breaks for the rich. It Seems everything we fight for hinges on the defeat of the Harper Conservatives. The question is how to help create the conditions for that change.

     These priority topics will be up front for discussion at the next Central Committee meeting of the Young Communist League. Step one is getting more deeply involved in real struggles of young people - like military recruiting or the campaign for a $10 minimum wage, which would match the minimum wage, more or less to inflation, and be a step towards $15 dollar raise.

     Now's the time to organize! There is a lot for young people to get active in, and the YCL has much to bring to these struggles.