Statistics Canada study finds no broad evidence AI drove Canada's youth hiring decline

Statistics Canada's study, published last week, examined labour force survey data for workers aged 15 to 64 in Canada from January 2006 to August 2026. It compared the six months before November 2022, when ChatGPT publicly launched, with the six months ahead of August 2026. The agency said it found "no broad evidence" that the rise of AI has led to substantial decreases in hiring or increases in job separation rates in Canada since November 2022. Hiring and separation rates over the period were "generally within historical ranges or represented a continuation of pre-existing trends," it said. Separation rates account for voluntary and involuntary endings of employment.

The agency said the same was true for younger workers and for jobs it classified as potentially more susceptible to AI substitution, such as data-entry clerks and coding-intensive occupations. Researchers classified jobs by potential exposure to AI and by complementarity with AI, which the agency said measured how the technology affects different jobs.

The youth numbers

For workers aged 15 to 29, the hiring rate in jobs with low exposure to AI fell from 4% in the six months before November 2022 to 3.3% in the six months before August 2026. In jobs more vulnerable to AI substitution, youth hiring edged down from 3.2% to 3%. Coding-intensive jobs saw hiring fall from 2.5% to 1.9%.

Hiring in coding-intensive fields had risen above 5% around 2020 and 2021, and Tahsin Mehdi, a senior research economist at the agency and study co-author, said firms may have over-hired during the pandemic. "Often people sort of mischaracterize that as an AI effect, when in reality it could have been firms just simply adjusting their workforce," he said.

Why AI is hard to isolate

Mehdi said the decline is hard to pin on one cause. "We have a lot of competing economic forces out there," he said, listing trade dynamics, U.S. tariffs, immigration shocks and rapid population growth. "If it's happening across the economy, then how can we really say that AI is definitely impacting certain jobs?" he said. "AI is another layer of complexity."

He drew a distinction between reshaping work and eliminating it. "AI is no doubt reshaping sort of workflows and redefining jobs right now. I have no doubt about that," he said. "It's just, it may not be eliminating entire jobs right now."

The stakes for young workers

Employment growth for younger workers was relatively weak in the post-pandemic period regardless of potential exposure to AI, according to the research. "After the pandemic, the labour market did shift in a substantial way, and some groups of the population, such as youth, they might be still sort of feeling the reverberations and aftershocks from the pandemic," Mehdi said.

The study comes amid ongoing concern over AI's effect on jobs. The Associated Press reported last week that Microsoft was offering voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees in Canada, India, the United Kingdom and the United States as the company spends heavily on AI. Viet Vu, manager of economic research at The Dais, a think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University, said he was not surprised by the findings and that they are part of a growing body of evidence, including his own research, that shows "you just can't detect AI's impact on the Canadian labour market just yet."

Vu said fear over AI can arise because it has the potential to affect every sector and is changing faster than the labour market is accustomed to. He said a greater fear among young people comes from the notion that AI can "change the fundamental social contract of work."

Mehdi said hiring and separation rates can offer "early signals of shifts in the labour market" whether due to trade dynamics, economic factors, tech disruptions or AI.