This week's Market Squared talks about the election issue we should all be talking about, the way we should be talking about it As we enter the home stretch this election campaign, I can’t stop thinking about an encounter I had last fall. I met someone new and exchanged the usual pleasantries. They asked what I did, and I explained how I’m a political journalist. “Oh, you don’t want to ask me about politics,” they said. Obviously, I asked. This person then explained to me that they couldn’t find a job, and there was one person to blame: Justin Trudeau. They said that because Trudeau had opened the proverbial floodgates to immigrants, it was impossible for them to find a job, and for that, Trudeau had to be removed from office and punished with, shall we say, extreme severity. I will leave it at that. They had my curiosity, now they had my attention. I had also struggled last year to find work, and the more you fail the more you question your own self-worth. Why is it so hard to find a job? Why doesn’t anyone want to hire me? Or even interview me? Where have I gone wrong? Why don’t I have the skills people want? Why can’t anyone see my value? Why can’t anyone just give me a chance? I get all of that, but at no point in any of my self-recriminations and hopelessness in finding work did I turn to blaming the Prime Minister of Canada, but even if I did, never in my wildest imagination would I wish violence to fall upon him as consequence. Practically speaking I don’t expect Trudeau, a son of privilege, a prime minister whose father was prime minister, to know what it’s like to struggle to find a job. I don’t expect him to know what it’s like to worry about losing his housing, or to think about swallowing his pride to go on unemployment or to use a food bank. I also don’t expect Mark Carney, a Harvard and Oxford alum who was the head of two different national banks, to know what that’s like either. I also doubt though that Pierre Poilievre understands it. I’ve been amused the last several months watching Conservative politicians dump on Jagmeet Singh, accusing him of holding up the previous Liberal government to secure his pension when the leader of the Conservative Party secured his the same month he turned 31. I can’t stomach a lot of hypocrisy but hating government while loving a government paycheque and benefits is a kind of hypocrisy I find especially rank. Still, politics, especially party politics at the federal level, are not designed for people with a working-class resume. It’s hard to sell someone that goes from job to job just to get a paycheque as someone “worthy” of leadership; that person has to have a career, degrees, connections, affiliations with non-profits and charities, ambitions and the ability to grasp them. We like to think of elections as a contest of ideas, but it’s really a contest of who has a better CV. This is why the most underappreciated issue of this election has been jobs. Of course, there’s been a lot of conversation about jobs like the jobs at risk because of the Trump tariffs, or the clash between jobs in resource extraction and green tech, but we haven’t talked about all the people looking for work and are having a hard time finding it. Not a week goes by on the Guelph subreddit where someone doesn’t post something to the effect of “How do you get a job in Guelph?” They’re pounding the pavement, writing and re-writing their resumes, using their networks, taking continuing education and using employment services but they’re still pockets full of hands when it comes to finding work. And you can’t really appreciate how desperately frustrating that is till you’ve been there. I know I didn’t. For many people in our community, getting to do something you love and earn a living is a fantasy. Like owning a house we’re told. But while the parties this election have talked about a lot about making it easier and cheaper to own a home, they haven’t really talked about making it easier for you to get a job that you care about. For that matter, they haven’t really talked about making sure you can get a job. Any job. Or if you can get a job, they haven’t made any guarantees that you will be able to make enough money to live on, or for that matter earn a living where you might live comfortably. Also, if you should lose your job, there’s been little in the way of discussions about universal basic income, or strong employment insurance rates, or making it easier to retrain for something *you* want to do, not the state. I abhor Doug Ford’s framing earlier this year when he said that people experiencing homelessness and poverty should stop watching The Flintstones and fill out a job application, but there’s an atomic structure to the argument that’s essentially correct: Getting a job is not necessarily the end of poverty, but even the fact of holding a job allows people to feel useful and engaged, as if they’re part of the broader project to make a better society. It gives you a place to build from. It’s been often observed that it’s easier to get a job when you already have one, which is a real chicken-and-the-egg thing when you’re struggling to just find one job, any job. Ford is incorrect that the willingness to fill out a job application is what’s holding people back, but a certain forced helplessness creeps in after someone fills out their 300th application. Why keep going at that point? This is where the despair embraced by my friend mentioned above sets it. If you can’t find a job, then someone must be stopping you because our politicians all think it’s easy, so there has to be someone to blame, so why not blame the prime minister? I wonder how many other things we can start to solve if we truly start to value work. What if we made it possible for everyone who wants a job to get a job? What if we valued all types of work? What if we said that if you work 40 hours a week or more then you should make enough money to live comfortably? And if you can’t get work, what if we made sure that we’re not compounding your stress with thoughts of eviction and starvation? That sounds like a pretty good platform someone should build an election campaign around.