How to navigate Canada’s silent youth employment collapse with resilience and strategy

It’s late October in Toronto, and the lights of retail windows flicker earlier this year. Behind the glittering displays, something quieter, and heavier is happening: the 2025 holiday job market is collapsing faster than most realize.

Seasonal job postings across Canada have plunged 15% from last year and remain 16% below pre-pandemic levels. For many Caribbean and international students who depend on these short-term jobs to cover tuition and send money home, this is emotional turbulence masked as market data.

Scarcity rewires how we see possibility. When you are an international student trying to balance rising rents, shrinking hours, and the weight of family expectations, your nervous system becomes a data processor of worry. The instinctive, survival-oriented part of the brain (the reptilian brain) narrows focus to immediate needs, “How will I pay for food this month?”

Meanwhile, the intuitive brain whispers narratives of identity and belonging, “Maybe I don’t fit here.” These are identity crises that are built on exclusionary hiring policies and racialized screening practices. 

“When the system closes the door, community becomes the key.”

According to Statistics Canada, youth aged 15–24 lost 28,000 jobs in April alone, pushing unemployment to 11.3%. Beneath that number lies another truth; racialized youth, particularly African Caribbean Canadians, face systemic bias that quietly dictates who gets a second interview and who doesn’t.

The collapse of seasonal employment exposes something more profound about Canada’s economic psychology: the country’s labor systems depend on the emotional endurance of its newcomers. Employers want “Canadian experience,” yet gatekeep access to it. Credentials from Jamaica, Trinidad, or Guyana are often dismissed, forcing highly educated youth into minimum-wage survival.

When formal systems fail, Caribbean communities have historically turned to what sociologists call “social capital resilience” networks of mutual aid, informal economies, and cultural trust. A young student from Scarborough recently described it best, “When the system closes the door, community becomes the key.”

Across Toronto, WhatsApp groups, neighborhood associations, and creative collectives have become informal job boards and support hubs. These are countercultures of care. They shift power back to the community level, where recognition replaces rejection.

The forces shaping this moment are structural and psychological. Automation is replacing frontline retail jobs, tariffs have disrupted manufacturing supply chains, and inflation is squeezing corporate margins, shrinking hiring budgets.

According to the Brookfield Institute, one in five Canadian jobs could be fully automated by 2028, many of them entry-level positions once seen as gateways for students. The U.S.–Canada tariff dispute cost over 33,000 jobs in March. Inflation continues to pressure businesses into hiring freezes. Each policy decision trickles down emotionally before it does economically, in the form of anxiety, loss of control, and shrinking self-worth among marginalized youth.

“Crisis also opens space for creative reinvention.”

Crisis also opens space for creative reinvention. The same technologies that automate cashier roles are expanding opportunities in logistics, AI ethics, and digital marketing. The challenge is not whether Caribbean students can adapt, they always have, but whether institutions will finally reward adaptability rather than punish difference.

What if the employment conversation shifted from, “Getting a job” to “Building a skill base rooted in community?” What if youth viewed 2025’s job crisis as a laboratory for experimentation?

Educational psychologists call this the “growth mindset pivot,” transforming setbacks into feedback loops for skill-building. Caribbean students can reclaim agency by expanding into emerging sectors like green tech, digital design, and entrepreneurship.

At the Toronto Caribbean Newspaper, where we work closely with equity-focused entrepreneurs and cultural curators, this strategic reframing has already changed lives. Students are learning to pitch their cultural fluency as a strategic asset, not a liability. They are forming collectives that cross disciplines, combining art, wellness, education, and technology, to create sustainable income ecosystems.

Community journalism must now do what traditional media often avoids: make visible the emotional labour behind economic struggle. Every statistic has a heartbeat. Every decline in job postings is someone’s deferred dream. It is also someone’s awakening: to purpose, to self-reliance, to collective possibility.

So, here’s the call: if the economy is tightening, our interconnection must expand. Mentor a student. Hire locally. Share information. Teach skills. Reimagine success as solidarity. This is how communities in crisis rewrite their own scripts. Not through rage or surrender, but through radical reengagement.