Across cottage country in Ontario, help wanted signs dot restaurant windows, marinas and resorts as businesses prepare for the summer influx of visitors.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
It’s mid-spring on Stoney Lake and at Carveth’s Marina in Lakefield, Ont., shrink-wrapped boats line the shore, waiting to launch. Workers clamber over damaged docks with drills and hammers in hand as the marina prepares for another summer season.
“We’ve got a lineup now of about 60 boats to get in the water,” said Randy Hauth, whose family has operated the marina for 50 years. “And we’re not going to get them all in for this weekend. We’ve got about 400 or so to get in the water for the season.”
Inside the marina, seated at his desk with a view of the water in front of him, he flips through resumés and paperwork and notes, tracking returning, new and prospective seasonal employees. Mr. Hauth said some relief is on the way, with a few student workers set to return.
“Right up until this week, we were kind of running with our main staff and really wearing them out because we’re calling on them for six, seven days a week for a little while,” he said. The marina normally has 16 staff positions, Mr. Hauth said, but seasonal roles typically filled by students remain unfilled as the season approaches, including one in the shop helping prepare and repair boats.
Outside the window, a motor boat putters by as a worker moves a piece of dock. The hours are long right now, and so is the to-do list.
Locked out of the city, some young buyers are heading to cottage country
Across cottage country in Ontario, help wanted signs dot restaurant windows, marinas and resorts as businesses prepare for the summer influx of visitors. Yet the traditional summer job has become harder to land. According to Statistics Canada’s most recent data, the unemployment rate for students has climbed to 16 per cent, while nearly 30,000 full-time youth positions were lost in April among young people aged 15 to 24. For the youngest cohort, those aged 15 to 19, the unemployment rate has surged past 22 per cent.
The contradiction is visible across the region: Employers say they still need seasonal workers, while young people are facing one of the toughest summer job markets in years.
The reasons are layered, including a softer economy, transportation barriers in rural areas, increased competition for entry-level jobs and employers increasingly looking for workers who can operate independently from day one.
“Youth employment conditions tend to be more sensitive to employer hiring appetite than other demographics,” said Brendon Bernard, a senior economist at Indeed Hiring Lab. “If employers want people with a track record and some work experience, well, we’ve got a growing crop of job seekers without work experience.”
Back at the marina, Mr. Hauth said the work demands versatility. Seasonal employees might spend part of the day pumping gas, helping customers in the front store or operating water taxis across Stoney Lake.
“They have to be multi-talented,” Mr. Hauth said. “You have to have a boater’s licence and you have to be an experienced boat driver as well and know this lake. Stoney Lake got its name for a reason. There’s rocks everywhere.”
Even local hiring can be complicated. Peterborough, the nearest city centre, is roughly a 40-minute drive away, and some workers arrive by boat from family cottages on the lake.
When asked about the disconnect between local businesses hiring and younger workers struggling to find jobs, Mr. Hauth pointed to experience. Some applicants can list things such as babysitting or dog walking, he said, but the marina often needs workers who can handle physical labour, customer service and safety responsibilities immediately.
In some cases, they’ve taken chances on younger workers who started by cleaning shorelines, and helping people dock before eventually driving water taxis and helping with repairs.
“We don’t mind doing that, but we’re a little bit limited on the amount of spots we can take on like that,” Mr. Hauth said.
About 30 minutes from the marina, in neighbouring Buckhorn, the Westwind Inn is also preparing for summer. In past years, the year-round resort employed around 30 workers, including seasonal staff, but the operation has become leaner in recent years.
This season, the business held off on hiring while waiting to hear whether it would receive funding through programs such as Canada Summer Jobs, a federal wage-subsidy program for employers hiring young workers.
“We definitely heavily relied on the government subsidies for hiring youth 30 and under,” said Inga Gallacher, whose family operates the resort.
Ms. Gallacher said they attended job fairs and found qualified applicants willing to commute from Peterborough and surrounding areas, but uncertainty around funding forced the resort to scale back hiring plans.
Like many businesses in the region, Westwind depends heavily on workers with access to reliable transportation. “There’s no public transit that comes to the Buckhorn area currently, so a car is a must,” Ms. Gallacher said.
She said the business increasingly relies on a smaller staff of experienced workers able to move between roles, making it harder to absorb the training demands that come with inexperienced hires.
“We develop relationships with these employees that we have working here,” Ms. Gallacher said. “They become part of the work family.”
For Indeed’s Mr. Bernard, the concern isn’t just whether young people can find work this summer, but the knock-on effects of a generation of workers struggling to secure an initial foothold in the labour market.
He said the slowdown has created a “traffic jam,” with older and more experienced workers increasingly competing for jobs that once served as entry points for teenagers. As hiring in white-collar sectors slows, some recent graduates are turning to food service and retail work instead, creating more competition for younger workers trying to land a first job.
“If people are moving up the job ladder more slowly, then there are fewer openings that employers need to backfill,” Mr. Bernard said.
Mr. Bernard said the long-term concern is what economists call labour-market scarring: The lasting effects that can come from missing early work experience and career opportunities.
“It’s not just important for that first job, but landing that next job,” he said. “Slowing career progression is definitely one way that we see recessions historically scar employment trajectories.”
At the marina, the value of experience is easy to see. From his office window on Stoney Lake, Mr. Hauth pointed toward two red markers and an island, where the safe route threads between rocks hidden below the surface.
“There’s a very narrow spot you can get through,” he said.
The same local knowledge needed to navigate Stoney Lake is also something the marina tries to pass on to younger workers, especially those who stick around for a few summers.
Mr. Hauth described two former summer students who not only learned the waterways, but eventually helped launch a clothing line for the marina, handling everything from designs to displays and ordering.
Both workers have since moved on, something Mr. Hauth speaks about with pride, if not a little longing.
“They’ve got to start somewhere.”