Will be interesting to see if the annual levels plans makes any reference to expected impacts of AI. Valid concerns and need for further thinking about appropriate policy responses, shorter and longer-term:
…So at writing, the only consensus on what skills will make someone employable in a five to ten year period, particularly in white collar jobs, are advanced critical thinking and problem solving ability acquired through decades of senior level managerial and product creation experience. So the question for anyone without those skills – read, youth – is, how can someone acquire those skills if AI is taking away entry level research and writing jobs? And how can they do that while competing with hundreds of thousands of non-permanent foreign workers?
While many parts of that question may remain without clear answers (e.g. whether current public investments in existing modalities of education make sense), there are some that are much more obvious. Where Canadian employers do have a need for entry level labour, those jobs should not be filled by non-Canadians unless under extremely exceptional circumstances, so that Canadian youth can gain skills needed to survive in a labour market where they’re competing against AI for work.
And translating that principle into action means that the Liberal government must (contrary to Coyne’s column) immediately and massively curtail the allowance of temporary foreign labour to continue to suppress Canadian wages and remove opportunity from Canadian youth. It’s clear that they haven’t given the topic much thought. Even their most recent Liberal platform only focused on reskilling mid-career workers, not the fact that AI will likely stymie new entrants to the labour market from ever getting to the mid-career point to begin with. While older Liberals may be assuming that the kids will be alright because they grew up with technology, data suggests AI will disrupt the labour market faster and more profoundly than even offshoring manufacturing did. Given that context, immediately weaning Canadian businesses off their over-reliance on cheap foreign labour seems like a no brainer.
But on that front, Canada’s federal immigration policy, particularly its annual intake targets, fails to account for the anticipated labor market disruptions driven by artificial intelligence. This oversight may have arisen because many of those setting these targets have had the luxury of honing their skills over decades in an economic landscape where life was far more affordable than it is today. Or, because it’s easier to listen to the spin from lobbyists who argue that they have the right to cheap foreign labour than to the concerns of millions of jobless Canadian youth. Nevertheless, the strategy of allowing Canadian youth to languish in this hyper-rapidly evolving and disruptive job market, while admitting hundreds of thousands of temporary low-skilled workers and issuing work permits to an equal number of bogus asylum claimants, demands an urgent and profound rethink.
Indifference to this issue, at best, will likely suppress wages and opportunities as the economy transitions to an AI integrated modality. At worst, it may bring widespread AI precipitated hyper-unemployment to an already unaffordable country, and all the negative social impacts associated with the same: debt, crime, and despair.
So the Liberals can either immediately push their absurdly wide open immigration gates to a much more closed position while they grapple with this labour market disruption out on behalf of Canadians, or pray that Canadians forgive them for failing to do so.
Source: For youth, AI is making immigration cuts even more urgent.
