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Royal Bank CEO David McKay dined with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just hours after a huge deal to buy the Kinder Morgan pipeline project was announced Tuesday.

But youth unemployment, not pipelines was the crux of the conversation.

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“We spent five minutes talking about the oil pipeline he just bought; we spent more time talking about the future of youth,” said McKay.

We are seeing more jobs, not less jobs, but they are different from the way we used work David McKay

The head of Canada’s largest bank says bridging the gap between available jobs and people who don’t have skills, experience or connections to fill them is vital to boosting the national economy.

McKay was in London Wednesday to promote Future Launch, the bank’s 10-year, $500 million program to support community-based youth training and employment programs.

McKay toured Goodwill Industries and then told a roundtable that one of the reasons Canada has outperformed other G7 countries in growth is the higher proportion of women and immigrants participating in the workforce.

He said RBC economists have calculated that boosting the number of young people in the workforce could boost the GDP by almost half a point.

It’s an issue especially relevant to London. Don Kerr, a demographer at King’s University College at Western University, has determined that about 25 per cent of working-age London residents are not working or looking for work, the highest proportion of any large Canadian city.

The roundtable was made up of people from agencies such as Goodwill, Youth Opportunities Unlimited and the YMCA that run youth employment and training programs that are eligible for grants from the RBC Future Launch program.

Representative of those agencies, who were members of the Indigenous, immigrant and special needs communities, told their personal tales of barriers they faced in the job market.

While many jobs are being eliminated, McKay said many more are being created but require technical skills and soft skills such as critical thinking and problem solving.