I've noticed a couple of recent media stories on the plight of youth ([1],[2]), and I have to say that I've seen worse.
Here is a plot of unemployment rates for people between the ages of 20 and 24:
For those of us who happened to be born in the early 1960's – this group is very large, and includes two WCI bloggers – unemployment rates of 13% would have been the stuff of fantasy; youth unemployment rates in the recession of the early 1980's reached 19%, and were an important factor in my decision to go to graduate school. The recession of the early 1990's wasn't quite as bad, but still worse than anything today's youth saw in the most recent episode.
More generally, the outlook for today's youth is pretty bright. Scarce resources can expect to command a certain amount of bargaining power, and so an aging population means that young workers can pretty much dictate their terms in the labour market.
If you're looking for people to pity, spend some time thinking about the sad fate of a member of Generation X (I was born in the same year as Douglas Coupland) reduced to sounding like one of these guys.
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
I just skimmed Farmer’s work (How the Economy Works) on Amazon and I think he’s good a good model of unemployment. Unemployment is a two-equilibria system where a given number of jobs can be filled by a many workers chasing a few jobs and or a large large number of employers chasing few workers. Much as we try to be blind to it, like Ireland liquidity Canada’s employment situation is caught in a sub-optimal equilibrium. We’d like to be in the optimal one, but we aren’t.
His theory actually does accord with my reality.