REMPEL GARNER: Young Canadians losing jobs to robots and 'temporary' foreign workers

This is the second article in Michelle’s summer op-ed series on non-obvious or uncomfortable problems that should be urgently addressed by the federal government.Michelle Garner Rempel is the Conservative Member of Parliament for Calgary Nose Hill. The following article from her SubStack is reprinted with permission.Last week, Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne penned a column about the federal government’s immigration levels entitled “A shrinking population is hardly what this country needs right now.”His thesis would have been at least notionally credible if he had addressed two obvious problems. But there’s a third problem that no one, including Coyne, seems to be internalizing. And that particular issue is what’s keeping me up at night probably more than any other Canada is facing today..The first two issues are relatively obvious. Coyne’s piece dropped around the same time that statistics underscored an alarming youth jobs crisis, with about one in five Canadian youth returning to school in the fall unable to find work. At the same time, statistics showed that almost 20% of the Canadian workforce is comprised of people in Canada on temporary visas. So it should be hard for anyone to ask for an influx of new immigrants, particularly non-resident low-skilled students, when the existing inventory is already crowding Canadian kids out in the job market.The third, much more alarming, issue is less obvious, because its impacts are only starting to be seen, whispered in hushed tones in quarterly earnings meetings at white-collar businesses and in public sector hiring discussions..Those hushed tones consistently sound something like this.At a dinner party a couple of weeks ago, I met a mid-career lawyer who repeated an anecdote I’d heard several times already in the past year: clients were becoming much less willing to pay for billable work by junior associates in their firm, making those junior roles harder to justify. The same story repeated with an accountant friend of mine: this year they dramatically curtailed hiring fresh-out-of-school accounting graduates. An acquaintance at a management consulting firm said the same thing: any new junior associates they’d be hiring wouldn’t be hired for their writing or research skills, but rather for their contact network. And given that junior associates rarely have any contacts with onselling potential, for the first time ever, they didn’t hire any junior associates into their office this year..By now you’ve guessed what Coyne missed in his column: that Artificial Intelligence is replacing entry level work at an alarmingly rapid pace. CEOs of AI firms, like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, have predicted that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years. And Geoffrey Hinton — a researcher who is considered to be the “Godfather of AI” — predicted that AI would wipe out most "mundane white collar work” in the next ten years. It’s not just AI leaders themselves predicting the collapse of white collar work and entry level jobs in general, either. Business related columnists are already shorting consulting firms. Employment researchers are already noticing the trend in their data, now predicting that AI is transforming job markets on an exponential curve as compared to any other employment disruption seen in human history. Employment equity groups are also sounding the alarm on the disproportionate impact this disruption is having on jobs available to women. And a recent Forbes article highlighted a McKinsey report that projected that by 2030, 30% of current U.S. jobs could be automated, with 60% significantly altered by AI tools, and a Goldman Sachs report that predicted that up that to 50% of jobs could be fully automated by 2045, driven by generative AI and robotics. And, for what it’s worth, I raised this issue in the House of Commons (I believe I was the first legislator in the world to do so) in late 2022..Complicating matters, especially for setting immigration levels, is the fact that the jury is still firmly out on what skills humans will need to thrive in an economy rapidly disrupted by AI. For example, just a year ago, some employment futurists suggested that the best way to "AI-proof" oneself was to learn how to craft smart AI prompts. But today, that discussion has shifted because AI development now focuses on systems inherently capable of long-term planning and autonomous action, which may soon lead to AI companions that proactively manage personal finances, health, and relationships without user prompts.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 on behalf of Canadians, or pray that Canadians forgive them for failing to do so.Let’s hope they choose wisely.Michelle Rempel Garner served as the Conservative Shadow Minister for Health and the Vice-Chair of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health from 2020-2021. She also has pre-political experience management consulting in primary health care service delivery.Michelle Rempel Garner@MichelleRempel