Where is Carney’s promised Youth Climate Corps?
[This piece was originally published in Canada’s National Observer here.]
In last November’s federal budget, the Carney government announced a two-year $40 million commitment to launch a Youth Climate Corps (YCC). While the budgetary pledge fell far short of the billion-dollar program the national campaign for a YCC had been calling for, this news was nonetheless the only climate “win” in what was otherwise a dismal federal budget from a climate perspective.
Well, it’s now eight months later, and still no YCC.
The budget said it would commence with the 2026 fiscal year (which started April 1). We are now more than a quarter into that fiscal year, with no YCC program launch, and no details have been forthcoming: not how it will work, who it will be open to or even who will oversee it. The delayed roll-out means we are going through another summer without YCC placements, despite brutally high youth unemployment and a bleak labour market, an urgent need to deploy renewable power and to retrofit buildings (jobs for which thousands of young people are keen to be trained), and yet another summer of climate-induced extreme weather events.
As CNO’s Natasha Bulowski has reported, the military, which is often called upon to assist in the face of extreme weather events, doesn’t want the job of dealing with domestic climate disasters. Thousands of young people across the country, on the other hand, could have been ready to rally in the defense of impacted communities. But the invitation to do so has yet to be issued.
Wondering what happened to the YCC promise? You are not alone. The young people across the country who have been campaigning for this new program for over three years are wondering too. The national campaign for a YCC has remained active, both pressing the government from the outside, and consulting with government officials on the inside, but the program appears stuck in the system.
Is this what Prime Minister Carney means by “moving at speeds not seen in generations”?
I emailed senior officials at Employment and Social Development Canada (the ministry tasked with implementing the YCC) and the office of Minister of Jobs and Families Patty Hajdu (who oversees that department). I submitted questions about what has been behind the delay, asked what the status of the YCC roll-out is and when Canadians could expect the program to be publicly launched, and pressed for details about the program’s design, governance, and partnerships. I asked more specifically if the YCC would be structured as a new public program, what the duration of job placements would be, about the nature of the training, and how the program would prioritize opportunities for marginalized communities.
I received replies only from media relations officers, whose responses were far from edifying and read more as satire. The full response I received can be read below, with a final assurance that “More information will be provided when available.”
Government response to my YCC questions:
As you can see, political gobbledygook that makes no effort to answer any of the specific questions I put to the department. And the programs named in this reply are not the YCC.
During the years spent pressing for a YCC, campaigners were often told the demand for a $1 billion commitment was “unaffordable” and “unrealistic.” But this feedback now feels disingenuous given the extraordinary sums Carney is apparently prepared to dispense for fossil fuel projects and the military — $65 billion this year alone for the military.
The young people who have been pushing for the program are not giving up.
“It is incredibly frustrating to watch the Carney government turn its back on young Canadians at precisely the moment they need leadership the most,” said Bushra Asghar, the national director of the YCC campaign in an emailed statement. “Across the country, young people are graduating into one of the toughest job markets in years, applying to hundreds of positions only to face rejection after rejection, while communities here at home and around the world are already living through the devastating impacts of the climate emergency.
“Every day this pilot is delayed is another day young people are denied meaningful work, communities lose desperately needed climate resilience, and public trust is eroded,” Asghar continued. “It’s a stark reminder that this government has chosen to leave young Canadians behind when they should be investing in our future.”
In a statement released mid-June, Aliya Boga-Hirji, the YCC campaign’s Western Canada Campaigner, called the delay and lack of information “extremely concerning.”
“Our campaign team has met with over 104 Members of Parliament and federal agency staff members since January, 2024. In addition, dozens of supporters of our campaign have contacted and met with their representatives to discuss the Youth Climate Corps pilot, increasingly so in the past few months, but none have reported back to us having received any substantial information about the pilot,” said Boga-Hirji.
According to Asghar, even some Liberal MPs have privately shared their disappointment that the government has “dropped the ball.”
There is a crying need to train-up thousands of young people across Canada to expedite the transition off fossil fuels and to defend communities in the face of escalating unnatural weather events. Mr. Carney, what’s the hold up?