A Racialized Canadian living in Toronto

In my youth I thought that if I studied earnestly, worked hard and was honest I would charge forth with a great career, family and life. This is what I was told by all and I believed them. The last 10 years here in Toronto has shown me otherwise. I am a racialized Canadian living in Toronto. Raised and educated (multiple degrees in computer science and business) in Toronto, Canada, ready and willing to work, I find it difficult to get a break back into full time employment.

I fit the definition of racialized Canadian to a “T”. Married, highly educated, and unemployed. It is difficult for me to talk about my situation because I am a very private person, but sometimes these hidden issues must be breached or they can kill you.

No matter what I do I cannot seem to get even an interview for a job that has a living wage. No matter how many job applications I fill out I get no break. I am not looking for a handout but a simple opportunity to earn money to support my family, nothing more than that.

Over time I have come to the conclusion that whatever I do to find work simply does not matter: The deck is stacked against me. Not that I know why this has occurred, nor do I know how to solve the problem, and I am sure this is happening to so many other Canadians, especially here in Toronto. There is no single reason that I can think of, so I will guess at some of the reasons.

Canadian Companies Will Not Train Staff: I recently did a stint as an IT recruiter and quickly found that Canadian companies want to hire people that have the exact skills they seek and are unwilling to train staff. This is true even if their requirements, such as software skills, are quite recent, with few people skilled in the requirement. In the past companies would hire for the ability to learn, work ethic and interpersonal skills.

What this means is that if you do not have these specific and often new skills, you will not get an interview, much less a job. For those who have no recent and specific job experience, for those recently graduated, for those coming from a foreign country where these requirements and skills are non-existent, for those who are older or younger, you’ll never make the cut. Sad, but true, and hence you then join the ranks of the racialized Canadian.

There are probably other reasons why companies are not hiring but they are difficult to say for certain. As Canadians we are polite and would never tell someone to their face that they would not be hired just because of their race. The Canadian way is to not say anything and to simply deny them the opportunity. Unfair maybe, but this is how we are. “Lack of experience”, which can mean anything from not having worked for a Canadian company to not having the specific and very narrow skills required by companies so that they need not spend money training you, to having less than fluent English language skills, is a very nebulous but often used reason. Discrimination of many kinds are possible but too hard to pin down.

Corporate Greed and Capitalism: Companies that offer free internships for no pay really hurt those that take these positions. Our government should he taking a strong stance against having people work for free and to be abused for their effort. Working for free does not benefit the worker in the short nor medium term because during this time the worker must pay for food, lodging, transportation and living expenses. Unpaid internships exacerbate the problem, sucking the life out of the worker. As a society we cannot sustain ourselves this way.

In the name of earning more corporate profits unpaid internships are free labour that can be abused at will. What happened to behaving in a civil manner and not try to enslave your fellow Canadian? I guess these values no longer exist?

Uncaring Canadian Government: One of the reasons we have a government is to protect citizens against the might of the Corporation. In this case I see the Government as facilitating and assisting Canadian corporations in spreading poverty throughout Canada. Sure the top 1% of Canadians certainly do benefit, but at the expense of the rest of the population?

For the Canadian government to allow companies to import employees from other countries when fellow Canadians can do these jobs seems to me immoral. How could this happen? This allows Canadian companies to advertise that they cannot find properly qualified workers here in Canada by putting up ridiculously high job requirements, then using these requirements to recruit foreign workers into Canada. Where is the oversight from the Canadian government that would protect fellow Canadians? Such a strategy allows Canadian companies to hire outside Canada rather than train Canadians. While this has worked in the past in a growing economy, such strategy has put so many Canadians into poverty.

Are higher corporate profits more important that the well being of the overall Canadian society? We, as Canadians, must change our government into a more caring one from one biased to corporate profits.

Without employment, much of our society will or has already degraded both economically and morally. What ever happened to taking care of your fellow citizen? No work means families have a difficult time raising their kids. Poor or marginal families do not shop, or at least minimally. University education becomes quite difficult when you cannot pay for it. Overall the world becomes a much meaner place. Do we really want such poverty in Canada? Do we really want to invite people from other countries to come to Canada and experience decades of poverty due to lack of paid work? The stress on parents and their marriages due to a lack of paid work is immense. Every step in life requires money and without paid work your options are very limited.

Canada is my home but I see it as a much worse place than when I was a kid. It is somewhat shameful how we treat each other these days, but these issues are macro in nature and are far from the reach of the common people. Without sufficient government leadership and intervention Canadian society will continue to add to the ranks of the racialized poor, making Canadian society poorer, sicker and more demoralized.

I hope that someone can prove me wrong. Here in Canada we have clean air, an abundance of fresh water but also a lack of jobs.