Talent is Canada’s most renewable resource.
This past week, in Toronto, the federal government made the case to global capital: Canada is “a reliable, stable partner in a world that is anything but.” Our nation-building ambition is real as much as it is overdue; and at the same time, Canada’s capacity to prosper can no longer afford to rest on trade agreements or alliances increasingly outside our control. What does it mean for Canada if the resource most in our control – our talent – stays underused?
Human potential is a resource we cannot afford to leave untapped. Leaving this asset idle is a national security and productivity crisis. Today, 1.5 million Canadians are out of work. Across Canada, the youth unemployment rate sits at 12.9% (Statistics Canada, 2026) while 29.9% of returning students aged 15 to 16 were shut out of the labour market this past summer.
These numbers represent far more than cyclical downturn. With more than 1 in 4 young people unable to land a summer job during high school, it is a structural economic decay. Every delayed career entry compounds into permanent wage scarring that can suppress their earning potential for years (Future Skills Centre, 2025). When entry-level opportunities vanish and the lower rungs of the career ladder fall away, a nation loses its ability to cultivate domestic leadership.
Canada has a critical minerals strategy. It has a housing plan, and an AI For All strategy. Yet physical assets and digital infrastructure are only as powerful as those operating them. Talent is not merely a resource; it is our primary geopolitical hedge. In a world of accelerating disruption, an adaptable domestic workforce is the only asset that foreign competitors cannot sanction, embargo or revoke. As Ontario’s largest employment and workforce development network, First Work contends that Canada can rely on much more than what it can compute, extract or export.
This is why public employment services must be recognized as critical national infrastructure. Embedded in main street storefronts, community agencies serve as the frontline shock-absorbers of economic transitions. They are the rapid-deployment engine required to match workers to strategic sectors, bridge regional labour divides, and turn systemic friction into productivity.
Properly resourced, community agencies supply what a labour market on its own does not: a first step for a young person with no experience to point to, a second chance for a 54-year-old worker whose factory closed, a soft landing for someone facing barriers they cannot explain in a cover letter, and a launchpad for the person who was always capable, but never had anyone positioned to notice. (First Work) (Statistics Canada)
Canada’s public employment services are better used as the connective infrastructure of a country trying to remain resilient, not only a downstream response to tariffs and labour market disruption.
First Work’s Executive Director, Akosua Alagaratnam, while keynoting Australia’s National Employment Services Association conference, spoke on the shared labour market challenges both countries face: “Human potential represents an individual’s agency, adaptability, and ability to continuously generate social and economic value. We must stop treating human potential as a static metric. People are not fixed numbers on a page. Everyone can learn, adapt, and build a better future when given the right support.”
This means treating credential recognition for newcomers as a velocity problem, measured in years of lost earnings. It means giving community-based providers a seat in how algorithmic tools for career development are procured, and it means bridging data across provinces and programs so a young person’s file or a returning Canadian’s credential can move as freely between provinces as capital. And it means accepting that a properly funded, properly trained career development workforce is not a cost to be minimized but the delivery mechanism for everything else on this list.
As we build the ports, the compute, the grid, and the housing, we must engage the networks that help supply the workers – the human potential Canada has to offer. A public employment services system is not adjacent to building a stronger economy; these days, nation-building happens at the employment centre.
Canadian identity has always had room for reinvention. The choice ahead is whether we can be a country defined not only by what we offer the world, but by what we choose to build in our people. Canada can decide, deliberately, that the career ladder is worth saving – because a nation that lets its own talent go underused is quietly ceding the one form of sovereignty nobody else can revoke.
To get more involved with First Work, the largest workforce development association in Ontario, join or partner with us at Blue Mountain Resort in Collingwood #Futures26: Investing in People, Strengthening Futures.
