Youth Employment and Skills Program: Step 1. What this program offers

First Nations, Inuit and/or Métis are 3 main Indigenous groups the program aims to serve better in the labor market. A youth may self-identify as belonging to more than one of these 3 Indigenous groups. The program serves all of the Indigenous subgroups, including Non-Status First Nations.

Disability means any impairment, including a physical, mental, intellectual, cognitive, learning, communication or sensory impairment — or a functional limitation — whether permanent, temporary or episodic in nature, or evident or not, that, in interaction with a barrier, hinders a person's full and equal participation in society.

Racialized youth are a group of people categorized according to ethnic/cultural characteristics and subjected to structural discrimination. The use of the term "racialized" acknowledges that race is a social construct that can negatively impact a person's social, political and economic life. (Examples: Black, East Asian, Latino/Latina/Latinx, Middle Eastern and/or North African, Pacific Islander, South Asian, Southeast Asian, mixed, another identity)

A newcomer youth is defined as having obtained permanent resident status in Canada; or, been granted permanent refugee status in Canada within the last 5 years. Temporary residents are not eligible as per the Program's Terms and Conditions (people on work or study visas, temporary residents with work permits, etc.).

2SLGBTQQIA+ is the acronym used to refer to the community of individuals in Canada who self-identify as Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, and additional sexually and gender diverse people.

OLMC are defined by both their geographic location and collective identity associated with the use of an official language in a minority setting. A resident of an OLMC is an individual whose first official language is not the majority language in their province or territory. This includes:

• A Francophone residing outside of Quebec
• An Anglophone residing in Quebec

The program recognizes that the lines separating remote, Northern, and Fly-in communities are not clear, and often overlap. For simplicity;

• A remote community is defined as one with no or little access to the services of the closest community with more than 1,000 residents and/or one that is without year-round road access.
• A northern community is considered to be any community in the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and the Yukon.
• A fly-in community refers to any community that requires scheduled or chartered flights to enter or leave for most of the year.

The program adopts Statistics Canada's definition of a Low-income household (after tax). The Low-income measure is a fixed percentage (50%) of median adjusted (after-tax) income of households.

• For a 1 person household: $27,352 or less;
• For a 2 person household: $38,682 or less (for example, a child and one parent/guardian);
• For a 3 person household: $47,375 or less;
• For a 4 person household: $54,704 or less;
• For a 5 person household: $61,161 or less;
• For a 6 person household: $66,998 or less;
• For a 7 person household: $72,367 or less.

This refers to the participant as a single parent, and does not include youth who grew up in a single parent household.

A person who:

• has not completed the final year of secondary school (high school)
• has not received their high school diploma (or an equivalent level of education)
• is not undertaking full-time study and has no intention to do so in the near future