Welcome to Need to Know, The Hub’s twice-weekly roundup of expert insights into the biggest economic stories, political news, and policy developments Hub readers need to be keeping their eyes on.
Canada’s youth keep getting hammered in the job market
By Aiden Muscovitch, The Hub’s assistant editor
National employment declined by 41,000 jobs in July, resulting in a 0.2 percentage point decrease in the employment rate, according to recent Statistics Canada employment data. The employment rate now stands at 60.7 percent. The unemployment rate remained at 6.9 percent through July.
Several industries reported employment decreases, with information, culture, and recreation leading the decline (-29,000), followed by construction (-22,000).
The decline in employment was primarily concentrated among youth aged 15 to 24, with a drop of 34,000 jobs. This demographic continues to face challenging labour market conditions, as the youth employment rate decreased by 0.7 percentage points to 53.6 percent in July. This marks the lowest rate since November 1998, excluding the COVID-19 years of 2020 and 2021.
From July 2024 to July 2025, youth unemployment in Canada fluctuated from a low of 12.9 percent to a high of 14.6 percent in July. This increase, paired with the sharp drop in the youth employment rate to 53.6 percent, signals a worsening job market for young Canadians marked by fewer openings and tougher competition.
With youth employment reaching its lowest point in a quarter-century, outside of the pandemic, many are entering, or are stuck in, a cycle of low-wage part-time work, unsustainable hours, and few career-building opportunities.
For the country as a whole, this is more than a short-term problem: a generation missing the early rungs of the job ladder risks long-term earnings gaps, even weaker productivity growth, and a diminished tax base. In an economy already grappling with demographic aging, excluding young people from the workforce today is a mistake that
Could supply management upend Canada-U.S. trade talks?
By Graeme Gordon, The Hub’s senior editor and podcast producer
Last week, the U.S. government was crying over spilled milk again. To be more precise, the U.S. International Trade Commission announced it is investigating the Canadian dairy industry for allegedly flooding the market with artificially cheap dairy protein. What is dairy protein, and why should you care?
Whey protein powders, infant formulas, sports drinks, and various other foods and nutritional supplements all contain dairy proteins, which are byproducts from making cheeses and other dairy products, and are a $14 billion USD global market. The U.S. is accusing Canadian suppliers of offsetting the lowering of prices on exported dairy proteins—mostly sent to America—by overcharging Canadians for dairy products domestically.
Dairy cows in a barn in Saint-Pie, Que., on Friday, July 11, 2025. Christinne Muschi/The Canadian Press.
To top it off, the U.S. dairy industry is accusing the Canadian industry of bypassing trade agreement rules to surreptitiously sell even more dairy protein, all while rigorously protecting its own domestic market with quotas and exclusionary high tariffs.
So, why does this matter?
Well, the ITC investigation of the Canadian dairy industry is set to conclude in March 2026, a few months before the renegotiation of the CUSMA trade agreement opens up in July. The almost certainly negative findings will set the scene for the U.S. president to once again demand that Canada open its dairy market to American suppliers.
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s minority government appears utterly committed to the dairy industry’s supply-management system after the Liberals helped pass last June the Bloc Québécois’ Bill C-202, which bars talks of scrapping supply management in trade talks. So, what else will Canada offer in lieu of the supply-management sacred cow? One thing is almost certain: Trump will be seeing red.
It should not be this hard to call out antisemitism
By Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa
Hours before the start of the Jewish sabbath last Friday, an Orthodox Jewish man walking by a park in Montreal with his children was badly beaten. The incident, in which the assailant repeatedly punched the man and then angrily discarded his kippah (a Jewish head-covering) into a puddle, was captured on video and spread quickly on social media. Coming on the heels of the recent vandalism of a Victoria, B.C. synagogue and the exclusion (and subsequent reversal) of Jewish groups from Fierté Montréal, there was a critical need for a strong response from government leaders.
Yet nearly 24 hours after news of the incident spread, there was only silence. That changed with an X post from Prime Minister Mark Carney at 4:01 pm on Saturday. Carney described the incident as “an appalling act of violence,” adding that “everyone in Canada has an inalienable right to live in safety.” My thoughts are with the victim and his family as they recover, and my support is with law enforcement as they work to bring the perpetrator to justice.” Social media posts following roughly the same script soon followed from cabinet ministers such as Evan Solomon, Steven Guilbeault, and Gary Anandasangaree (Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand could seemingly only muster a repost of the Carney X post accompanied solely by the word “This,” and a repost of Anandasangaree’s post with the caption “Hate has no place here.”).
The government response was notable not only for the obvious word-smithing and unwillingness of officials to speak out until Carney had done so. Carney opted for generic references to violence, making no mention of what many believed lay at the heart of the attack: antisemitism. For months, officials have struggled to explicitly acknowledge antisemitism, frequently couching it in more general terms or adopting an all-hate-matters approach that invariably includes references to Islamophobia and other forms of hate.
All hate does matter. But if the prime minister and his cabinet are unable to call out antisemitism by name, the community will understandably fear that the risks they face are not being seen. Last year, the government published a much-needed handbook by the special envoy on antisemitism on the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. The stated goal was to help recognize “antisemitic expression, behaviour, intention and impact.” The government needs to give its own handbook a read because it should not be this hard to call out antisemitism.
