True Patriot Love - June 17, 2026


[Sneak Peek] Canada's Youth Unemployment Problem ft. Tristin Hopper

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Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

174.86

Word count

1,769

Sentence count

62

People

Guests:
Tristin Hopper
Also mentioned:
David Eby Mike

Harmful content

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Tristan Hopper joins me to talk about his new book, "Don't Be Canadian: How One Country Did Everything Wrong" and why Canada needs to do more to help its youth find a job. We also talk about Canada's youth unemployment rate, and why it's so bad.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 I mean, this has been brought up in Bank of Canada reports.
00:00:02.600 This has been brought in TV economics reports,
00:00:04.920 where they're saying the nature of the immigration
00:00:07.240 coming into Canada.
00:00:08.960 The reason, you know, we have been
00:00:11.040 such a successful immigration story
00:00:12.760 is because of our screening.
00:00:13.920 We were really, up until very recently, 0.98
00:00:16.960 we were very uptight about who we brought into the country. 1.00
00:00:19.200 So, you know, you have to have skills,
00:00:20.920 you have to speak the language,
00:00:21.800 points-based immigration system.
00:00:25.480 But 2021, that's all completely out the window.
00:00:30.000 well the news canadian youth unemployment numbers are sending some mixed signals
00:00:36.840 and uh of course uh in light of 99 000 new full-time jobs it seems that our youth employment
00:00:44.740 is down at an abysmal rate and to talk to us more about that the guy who wrote don't be canada
00:00:50.680 how one country did everything wrong tristan hopper and by the way don't expect a tip
00:00:56.400 here's tristan hopper how's it going man good good thank you for having me back on your podcast
00:01:02.120 well delighted how's the book going uh book's doing well uh it is sold uh well it's it's weird
00:01:09.760 because uh you know working in the video and podcast and you know writing space uh i mean
00:01:15.620 hopefully if you write a good article it'll get you know 200 000 plus viewers i mean i've written
00:01:22.260 articles that have done one million i've written social media posts that have gotten north of 50
00:01:26.300 million so you'll get a call from your book publisher and it'll be like oh smash hit amazing
00:01:31.040 amazing sales uh and i'll say well how many were sold and they'll say well more than 5 000 so which
00:01:37.840 sounds like a criminally low number but uh i guess you know it's different levels of you know someone's
00:01:43.540 buying it they're picking it up they're reading it they're sharing it with their friends um so
00:01:48.860 it's it's sort of this trade-off between yeah you can write a you can write a social media post that
00:01:52.780 has 80 90 million views but the level of engagement is different than someone who actually picks up a
00:01:59.260 book and spends their entire day reading it and you know potentially discussing it with their
00:02:04.300 friends so you're creating mass appeal for you know very dedicated appeal yeah no and i actually
00:02:11.280 i uh commend you for for noting that because and and by the way the publishers are excited because
00:02:16.260 5,000 now means they extrapolate that into 100,000 over time. I'm sure that's their math
00:02:22.920 methodology. But you're right, for somebody to actually engage and go through your entire thought
00:02:28.540 process on a book, well, that's a real fan base. So well, congratulations on that. You know, I love
00:02:34.980 your take on Canada on the whole, because you point out some stuff that many of us kind of
00:02:41.100 think is an obvious, but it seems to be missed by traditional media by and large and missed
00:02:46.420 sometimes by our own governments and ourselves. But this one is hard to miss. As I pointed out,
00:02:54.000 just as we started here, 99,000 full-time jobs and still we're at 14% unemployment among
00:03:02.600 youth in Canada. This is a time in your life where getting a job is really important, I think,
00:03:09.620 and learning how to handle being employed and manage money and manage the job in the workplace
00:03:16.240 and all of that. And here we are. Don't forget just socialization. I often say that, you know,
00:03:23.000 I'm a tall rich kid who thinks he's better than everybody else. So very similar to VC Premier
00:03:27.100 David Eby. I think there's an alternate course. Fortunately, I just got a bunch of entry level
00:03:32.460 jobs in my early 20s where it was just, you know, hairy guys named Mike screaming at me to shut up
00:03:37.740 And, you know, put me on a more realistic course, making me the man I am today.
00:03:41.740 If that had not existed, it's very possible I could be, you know, gluing myself to a highway somewhere.
00:03:48.900 So just just culturally a population of kids that are, you know, working at age 16 forward.
00:03:56.520 I think that makes for a healthier population. But, yes, I mean, you speak to anybody.
00:04:01.400 The next time you're around someone under the age of 25 and you're looking for a conversation starter,
00:04:06.680 ask them how impossible it is to find a job because this is this is pretty uniform this is
00:04:12.540 just you know summer opens up either they're an undergraduate or they're a high school student
00:04:17.800 and I'm going to make some money and yeah just dozens and dozens of resumes wholly different
00:04:23.280 from when I was a kid when you know in the 1990s I live in a tourist town you could find something
00:04:30.240 most people who could find a job could find something and yeah the consensus which is backed
00:04:35.420 up by the data, even as, so unemployment is, as you probably, as your viewers probably
00:04:42.500 know, unemployment means you're trying to get a job, but you can't get one. And then
00:04:46.420 often what you'll have is you'll just have teenagers just exiting the job market and
00:04:50.960 saying, well, I'm not going to find a job, screw this. I'll just take up our debt or
00:04:54.380 whatever. So even with lots of teenagers becoming disillusioned in under 20s, becoming disillusioned
00:05:01.940 and exiting the job market, something that usually brings the unemployment rate down,
00:05:05.860 we still have record high unemployment.
00:05:08.840 So it's one of many things when I'm trying to explain Canada to non-Canadians or people
00:05:17.100 who are confused by the way we run ourselves, I'll often say, well, the impacts of our policies
00:05:23.460 are very disparate.
00:05:25.740 So someone who thinks Carney is doing a great job and if you're on the front lines and you
00:05:30.820 can see the problems, you can see the decline, you can see the various things that need to be
00:05:35.720 fixed in Canada. It can seem baffling that we have a prime minister pursuing all these and he still
00:05:40.540 has an approval rating and 60% plus. And I asked them to consider there are large swaths of this
00:05:46.380 country that never have to see the things that you're seeing. They don't go down town, so they
00:05:51.400 don't see the tent cities. They're retired. All they've seen is their real estate values are going 0.51
00:05:57.640 up um as a result of a dysfunctional uh economy um they're not the ones looking for entry-level
00:06:04.480 jobs so you'll actually see these employment reports and it'll be among the 50 plus set
00:06:08.960 unemployment is going down as it skyrockets uh for youth so what younger people um are experiencing
00:06:16.800 is just a complete 180 uh from what older people are experiencing in a way that's never really
00:06:24.540 existed before well Tristan you pointed it out when we were kids I mean I had two summer jobs 0.91
00:06:30.060 there was an there was an abundance of summer jobs I worked at the beer store during the day
00:06:34.900 and I worked fairly drunk as a waiter in the evenings it's neither here nor there but I was
00:06:39.860 a painter and a waiter yeah there was a it was a there was a plentitude of availability come
00:06:45.560 summertime and employers knew that there was going to be these students available they planned work
00:06:50.640 accordingly. They plan scheduling accordingly. It offset tourism potentially. Now, you just said
00:06:57.600 something that tweaked me. I was like, yeah, these are entry-level positions. We used to call them
00:07:03.720 summer jobs, summer employment positions, student employment. Now we call them entry-level jobs.
00:07:12.800 Yeah. Well, I guess I'm using the term to just mean low-skilled jobs.
00:07:17.380 I'll be honest with you, Tristan, it comes up in the stats defined that way.
00:07:22.520 So now we're looking at if you look at it statistically, and I guess I come off like a real math brain to everybody.
00:07:29.940 But even to a layman like me, statistically speaking, those jobs have been amalgamated now.
00:07:37.740 What was an entry level job and a summer job are now all in the same silo.
00:07:41.900 Yes. So in terms of why this is happening, I'm sure everybody's just screaming at, you know, whatever device they use to get their podcast.
00:07:51.660 They're yelling at it right now and saying, well, many devices. 0.88
00:07:54.180 Yeah, it's driven by immigration. And that's not that's I mean, everybody has had this thought.
00:08:00.600 You're like, OK, the youth can't get jobs. The last five fast food places I've gone to seem to be a recent immigrant behind the counter.
00:08:07.360 this seems to be driven by immigration now sometimes um you know you can get that sense
00:08:13.200 and you know maybe it's not backed up by the numbers or whatever but in this case uh there's
00:08:17.660 any number of serious-minded economists whether it's cibc reports or tv reports and they'll just
00:08:23.800 say well look at the stats uh canada's always had well not always but ever since the harper era
00:08:29.260 there's been sort of a low level of temporary foreign workers coming the temporary foreign
00:08:32.980 worker program was devised as a result of you had crazy oil booms in Alberta, you know,
00:08:39.860 anybody who can, you know, open both eyes, and sometimes even not was able to get a job
00:08:47.000 in the oil sands, you know, starting at $25 an hour. So in that situation, you basically
00:08:52.480 like a and W's and marshals and whatever multi positions, nobody could find work under any
00:08:58.860 circumstances whatsoever. So essentially had them petitioning the federal government to
00:09:02.820 say, well, can we bring in, you know, a student, they're here for six months, they make a higher
00:09:08.500 wage, they send it home, you know, go back to, you know, it's something that's happened in Canada
00:09:13.440 for 400 years. You used to bring Scots in, they'd work entry level bookkeeping at the HBC fort,
00:09:18.820 and then they'd go back to Scotland with their earnings. So can we, so this is where it started. 0.97
00:09:24.320 And then you saw a massive explosion, not just of the temporary foreign worker program, 0.80
00:09:27.940 that's the one that gets all the heat, that's the one everybody hates. But I mean, if you look at
00:09:32.280 charts it's like temporary migration and then right around 2021 massive spike right so a million
00:09:38.520 people uh per year uh over the course of three years the highest surge in immigration certainly
00:09:44.760 among any developed countries in that time period um so even compared to all the other western
00:09:51.400 countries that kind of have migration issues. Canada was well...