I commend Councillor Cyril MacDonald for questioning the student jobs lottery. Having grown up in the CBRM, I was never one of the ‘lucky’ students chosen at random for a municipal summer job, notwithstanding the fact that my area of study would have made me an excellent candidate. Many of my mates found themselves in the same position.
The lottery, whilst on the face of it may seem a fair and equitable way to allocate the small number of positions available, lacks one major criteria: merit. The lottery takes no account of the suitability of the applicant for the job and as a result many young, motivated, educated Cape Bretoners are left out in the cold. I found myself in exactly this position. It is much easier to accept not being hired because there is a better candidate, rather than not being hired because another candidate had their name drawn out of the hat, despite the fact they may be less qualified or significantly less interested in the role.
I wish to make clear that this is not the ramblings of a bitter person: I am now deputy in one of Australia’s busiest urban planning departments at one of Australia’s fastest growing municipalities. I got here by merit—that’s how the world ought to work (and how it often does work outside of Cape Breton). It’s just a shame that I didn’t have an opportunity to gain any related experience in my hometown because the hiring process was not based on merit, but rather the luck of the draw. I want to see a fairer process for the next generation so that students have a chance of gaining experience in their field of study.
When I was vice-president of the Cape Breton University Students’ Union in 2014, I was invited to take part in an address by student leaders to Business Cape Breton members about how the region can retain its young people. My remarks, which were reported in the Cape Breton Post, were essentially that opportunities needed to be based on merit if we had any hope of retaining young, educated people. I believe replacing the student lottery system with an independent, merit-based hiring system is an excellent example of how we can improve the local employment conditions for young people. I commend Councillor Cyril MacDonald for raising this issue and I hope that the rest of the council will work to introduce a modern, merit-based approach to student hiring so that we have the best suited person in each available municipal student summer job.
This piece was original published in the Cape Breton Post on 3 April 2022. Photograph by Billithecat on Pixabay.
