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 has arrived in Canada within the last 5 years and has obtained permanent resident status in Canada or been granted permanent refugee status in Canada. 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: $28,863 or less
• For a 2 person household: $40,818 or less (such as – a child and one parent/ or guardian)
• For a 3 person household: $49,992 or less
• For a 4 person household: $57,726 or less
• For a 5 person household: $64,540 or less
• For a 6 person household: $70,700 or less
• For a 7 person household: $76,364 or less

The youth employee is the parent in a family containing only one parent with their child(ren). This can include a single parent who has full or partial custody of their child(ren).

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