It's a common trope in high schools across the land: "When are we actually gonna use this stuff?"
In response, school boards across the province have created a number of courses that teach "real life" topics, such as personal finances, civic education, and parenting classes.
What do I use?
Surprisingly, I use math the most in my day-to-day life. It's not always algebra - a lot of the time, it's simply the basics. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division come up all the time. Percents and some fractions. Some slightly more advanced stuff comes up - rate of change, interest, and so on. Math was always a subject I was skilled at, but wasn't always passionate about.
English also plays a role - but not the "describe the imagery" garbage they feed you. Instead, a lot of it has to with analysis and extracting information from written texts. These texts can get pretty damn complex, so knowing how to identify shades of meaning is really useful.
Science has also played a part. As a CM, part of my job relies on knowing the science of coffee - in particular, chemistry and agronomy/botany. I remember I absolutely hated the botany unit in bio, but was taken with the genetics unit. Now, botany is part of my job.
Civics is definitely a thing. When you're marking an X on a ballot to decide who's gonna run the country on your behalf, you'd better have a decent civics education. This isn't to say a civics course should teach you your own morality, or try to impose opinions. On the contrary. The course should be objective about how "the system" works, how it was set up to disadvantage certain people, and so on.
Careers was ... interesting for me. I had a teacher who was a big union mover-and-shaker, and she tended to be more interested in the proletariat's battle for justice rather than actually teaching students how to get a job and earn money. In fact, most of my job-hunting skills have come from good old Craigslist, LinkedIn, and a handy-dandy book I once read called The Damn Good Resume Guide.
If I had to say what kind of course I'd love to see put in place in Ontario high schools, I'd have two answers.
First answer would be a critical reasoning course. It's not exactly about extracting information from a text, but extracting information from a situation, and then making informed choices. Newspaper analysis (compare and contrast), perhaps political literature from each of the major parties, some fun facts about body language, and so on, eventually turning into leadership studies. It's a course that'll teach you how to think intelligently, and perhaps strategically too!
Second answer would be Research and Inquiry Skills. The Ministry already requires each course have objectives related to these skills. Students will learn to use Google. Christ. How about we call it "Beyond Google"? Basically, the course I'd envision is about books, articles, intelligent web searches, and so on. Field trip to the Reference Library. Phone interviewing techniques - yes, people still interview on the phone.
Anyway, rant over.
