Speech for Maurizio Bevilacqua, MP

Conference on Young Entrepreneurs

I'd like to start, of course, by thanking you for having me. Since being elected to Parliament, I've always been greatly interested in youth affairs.

Part of this has to do with my own age, of course, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that young people so rarely live up to their bad press.

We have a lot of misconceptions about this so-called Generation X.

If you listen to what you see in the news, you'd think today's conference would be populated entirely by purple-haired slackers with skateboards under their arms and jewellery in their noses.

I don't see many people like that here today, and no wonder. According to a poll in Mademoiselle, 95 per cent of the people who are supposed to be Generation X don't think the term applies to them.

And in a way, it doesn't. Canadian writer Douglas Copeland used the term as the title of a book about people who'd be in their 30s now, and he stole the term from a British 70s punk band. Those guys would be in their 40s now.

So at the risk of invoking that great cliché in all "speeches for young people" -- quoting from a rock star -- I'd like to bring up another Canadian, Alanis Morissette.

She sings, "I care but I'm restless, I'm free but I'm focussed, I'm green but I'm wise." That song, "Hand in My Pocket," is full of contradictions, but the most obvious one is this ... even though we hear a lot of bad news about young Canadians, "what it all comes down to, is that everything's going to fine, fine, fine."

In fact, in spite of persistently high unemployment rates, young people are actually more optimistic than their elders. A 1996 Yankelovich poll found that 91 per cent of young people agreed when asked if they could get what they want if they work hard enough. The figure for the baby boomers is roughly 10 per cent less.

How can this be? What explains this optimism? In part, it has to do with the brightening outlook for youth employment. We're expecting the youth unemployment rate to fall by nearly a third once the economy reaches its potential over the next three years.

But I think the real reason for that optimism comes from two words: self-employment.

This generation is remarkably entrepreneurial.

Let me give you just one example out of thousands.

Philip and Richard Smart founded Visual Applications Software in Burlington.

Philip is 28 and his brother Richard is 27. Their company is already in its fifth year.

The brothers grew up watching their father work in computer sales and they created their company almost as soon as they were out of the commerce program at McMaster University.

Their company created a software package called FieldPro, which allows high-tech service organizations to track their business from customer calls, to assign technicians, to monitor parts inventory and to evaluate the performance of service contracts. And it does all this from a Windows desktop, rather than from a mainframe, which makes the product much cheaper than its competitors.

The brothers have doubled their sales every year and the bulk of its business is exports to markets in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America.

They even won a Young Entrepreneur Award last year.

I bring up the Smarts because they made their mark in high technology. I notice that your conference is based on the connection between youth and the new economy and I think this is wise.

It's remarkable the impact that young people can have in a young industry. Young coders practically built the computer industry, for example. After all, this is a business where the grand old men are Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, both of whom are an ancient 42 years of age!

In the new economy, nobody's position is unassailable. There might well be a small businessperson in this room who will grow fast and move in the top circles of the economy. Right now, Bill Gates, the world's richest man, is desperately trying to catch up to Netscape, a company founded five years ago in a coffee shop by a student making seven bucks an hour.

Dreams happen, folks.

We forget this when we read all the bad news, and I don't just mean about youth.

Yes, the new economy cost a lot of jobs, and yes, it cost them in big, hard-to-miss megacorporations. But what it also did was create a lot of jobs. Those jobs are harder to find, because they were created by people like you.

According to the Conference Board of Canada, by 2015, the productivity we get from information technology will create another half million jobs. And these jobs won't be in shuffling paper between layers of some vast Bay Street bureaucracy. They'll be in little companies like the one the Smart brothers started up, like the ones that you have been cultivating.

In fact, even though we hear mostly about the big companies, of the nearly one million businesses in Canada, 99 per cent of them have 100 or fewer employees.

It is the small businesses that generate more than 40 per cent of economic output.

It is the small businesses that create 90 per cent of new jobs in Canada.

Everywhere you look, small companies are finding the new markets, spotting new challenges, and positioning themselves to benefit from the new economy.

From coast to coast, there are literally thousands of inspirational stories about people just like you who have gambled on their own ideas and won. And they did it by working hard and using their heads.

You don't hear those stories often enough.

You don't hear about the software company hacking code in Kanata, or the freelance architect working from her home in Burnaby, or the small factory outside Halifax that has landed its first big European contract.

But thanks to the new economy, those businesses are going to be a bigger and bigger part of Canadian life.

The new technology is making it easier than ever to step up to your ambitions. We were talking about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs before. Gates built Microsoft out of a rathole of a hotel in New Mexico, across the street from his biggest client. Jobs helped build the first Apples out of his parents' garage. You don't have to be well-connected anymore. Technology is the great equalizer, and not just for technology companies.

When we look at youth employment figures from the Labour Force Survey, we realize just how close the correlation is between education and employment. In 1976, it didn't make all that much of a difference to your employment chances if you finished high school or went on to university.

Not anymore. Today, the young person who stops after high school is more than twice as likely to be unemployed as her colleague who finishes university.

Even if you're not soldering motherboards for a living, these days you have to know what a motherboard is.

That idea is one of the principles behind our Youth Employment Strategy.

This strategy is helping young people get that all-important first job, and we're pulling it all together with the help of business, labour, industry, not-for-profit groups and other levels of government.

Whether you're looking for work experience or labour market information, this program has been carefully worked over so that it really works.

Let me talk about this a bit.

There are four parts to this strategy.

First, there's Youth Internship Canada. In 1997-98, we expect to use wage subsidies to help employers hire 25,000 young people. Since 1994, we've helped nearly 50,000 young people and our figures show that a year after they leave the program, two thirds of participants are employed, many of them with the same employer.

When I say that the strategy works, this is what I mean.

The second part of the strategy is Youth Service Canada, which funds community service projects that hire students. A year after being in this program, about half of the participants are employed.

Then there is the Student Summer Job Action. You may know about this one, because it includes loans for young people who want to start their own businesses. Of the employers who hire students through this program, two thirds of them tell us that they wouldn't have hired a student otherwise.

And finally, there are the information and awareness initiatives. Foremost among these is our Web site, at www.youth.gc.ca. More than 60,000 people have been to the site this year.

One of the highlights of the site is its extensive list of links. For example, an entire section of the site is devoted to self-employment. Curious about the 19 sources of capital for your start-up? It's there. Check it out ... www.youth.gc.ca.

In addition to the Web site, we also have a 1-800 number. It's 1-800-935-5555. We've also held conferences, seminars, Youth Info Fairs and Canada Career Week activities. And, of course, we come to events like this.

I especially enjoy being here, because all of you refute the old prejudices about our young Canadians. Lazy slackers? The Smart brothers out in Burlington sure aren't lazy. Baggy pants and backward baseball caps? Don't see many of those out there. No initiative? Not at all. You people are the pioneers of the new economy.

You are comfortable with the new technologies and you are at ease with the new ways of doing business that inevitably follow those technologies.

But most importantly of all, you have looked at an economy where nobody is going to give you a job, and you've gone out and created your own. In fact, many of you have employees of your own. You are evidence of the new economy in action. Canada's prosperity depends on people like you.

That's why, since 1992, HRDC has provided more than $17 million so that SEDI could help nearly 2,000 clients become self-employed. The partnership between SEDI and HRDC proves not only that self-employment works, but that government can help Canadians help themselves.

I quoted from an Alanis Morissette song a little earlier, and I'd like to end on that same note, although it's not a note I'll try singing!

The song was "One Hand in My Pocket," and the chorus goes: "I've got one hand in my pocket, and the other's giving a high-five."

There's a man named Richard Thau. He's the executive director of a think tank called Third Millennium and he had an interesting observation about that chorus. The high-five is certainly optimistic, but there's a very good reason why the other hand is in her pocket. That's where her wallet is! Optimism, then, depends on careful financial considerations.

I think that's an apt metaphor for this entrepreneurial generation.

Thank you.