From cook to electrician: How Indigenous youth are bouncing back from the pandemic

Indigenous people were disproportionately hard hit by pandemic job losses. Some of them are taking the chance to pull off dramatic career pivots.

Carissa Menz, 27, loved being a cook. Working for restaurants all over Vancouver, she’d pour her “heart and soul” into it, she says.

But after being on temporary layoff for months in the COVID-19 pandemic and then working with reduced hours for a while longer, she needed a change.

Today, Menz, who is a member of the Pasqua First Nation in Saskatchewan, is training to become an electrician, thanks to a fully-funded opportunity she found through the Aboriginal Community Career Employment Services Society (ACCESS). The work is fiscally demanding, she says, but that doesn’t seem to faze her.

“I get stronger every day,” she quips.

Menz, who was just hired on as an apprentice at Western Pacific Enterprises after some training and a preliminary on-the-job experience, says her pay has already increased from around $16 an hour to around $18 an hour.

In six months, she says, she’ll get another raise to roughly $20 per hour, the pay level it had taken her 10 years to work up to in the restaurant industry.

Indigenous People in Canada, who were more likely to be employed in low-paying service-sector jobs, have been disproportionately affected by pandemic layoffs, according to Statistics Canada.

But as economic growth picks up speed in the recovery, that picture is changing.