Federal parties whose election platforms promise a Youth Climate Corps aren’t committing nearly enough funding to meet the demand, and Liberal leader Mark Carney’s “fiscal and costing plan” relegates the YCC to a pilot project in a campaign that has emphasized bold, transformative action, longtime advocates for the corps say.

The Liberal commitment would only fund about 500 positions at a living wage of $25 per hour, they warn, when well over a million Canadians aged 18 to 35 told a pollster they would “definitely” consider signing up.

Led by the Vancouver-based Climate Emergency Unit, the Youth Climate Corps campaign is calling for a start-up budget of $1 billion per year to fund “20,000 well-paid jobs that drive down emissions, strengthen our ecosystems, and respond to climate disasters,” Climate Action Network Canada (CAN-Rac) explains in a release this week. The budget is meant to grow as additional participants enrol in the program.

“Our next federal government will have to contend with the emergencies and disruptions brought on by the climate crisis,” Climate Emergency Unit Team Lead Seth Klein said in the CAN-Rac release. “Our country desperately needs a new program that invites young people to meet this crisis at scale.”

In a summary of the party platforms this week, the Emergency Unit says a $500-million pledge in the NDP plan comes closest to the budget the campaign is looking for. Carney’s costed budget commits $28 million per year over two years for a YCC pilot project. The Green Party platform includes a “strongly worded commitment” but no dollar figure, the Bloc Québécois has made no specific commitment, and Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives “do not have a climate plan in their platform, let alone anything to say about the Youth Climate Corps,” the Emergency Unit writes.

“They say only what climate policies they will eliminate (such as the industrial carbon tax, clean electricity mandate, and zero-emission vehicle mandate) and how they will expedite and expand the extraction of fossil fuels.”

But even $1 billion per year might fall short of public demand once a full-scale Youth Climate Corps begins to roll out, Klein told The Energy Mix.

“The appeal to us of the Climate Corps is that it’s a transformative program that signals emergency,” he said. But a corps with 500 participants “would fit in my son’s elementary school. So that’s not emergency.”

With the country facing Donald Trump’s economic warfare on top of the impacts of climate change, “I think what the new government will find is that it’s really needed given what’s confronting us,” Klein added. “It’s going to be young people who experience the brunt of unemployment in the wake of this, so they’re going to need other forms of employment support, and it’s a chance to rally in our collective defence. So whether it’s climate change or confrontation with Trump, here’s something that does both.”

But with only 500 spots, “it’s going to be instantly oversubscribed by a few thousand more.”

A Youth Climate Corps can also be part of the work force development that will be needed to speed up the energy transition, aspects of which Carney has described as a “nation-building project” that has to move faster than we’ve imagined possible until now. Klein recalled a recent talk by Hydro-Québec CEO Michael Sabia who said the lack of skilled labour to meet his utility’s rapid expansion plan is what keeps him up at night.

“If we’re going to build a national grid and a high-speed rail network, here is a program that is purpose-built to speak to that,” Klein told The Mix.

In yesterday’s media release, CAN-Rac and the Climate Emergency Unit both said they were pleased to see cross-party support for the concept of a Youth Climate Corps. In the Liberal camp, “a lot of people behind the scenes worked really hard to get this [into the platform],” Klein said, including a number of Liberal MPs.

“But having forced it in there, it manifests in a way that is at odds with the language that Carney himself uses. If his mantra is indeed building at a speed we’ve never seen, that is at odds with ‘here’s a two-year pilot for $28 million [per year], we’ll see how it goes’.”

Last year, polling commissioned by the Climate Emergency Unit indicated that even 20,000 spots per year would barely scratch the surface of the potential demand for the program. Some 65% of youth aged 18-35 said they would consider joining, Abacus Data reported in mid-November 2023, and 15% said they would “definitely” consider. Interest was highest on the Prairies and in Atlantic Canada, followed by Quebec, the Emergency Unit said at the time.

With nine million people across the country in the 18-35 age group, the 15% figure adds up to 1.3 million potential applicants, Klein noted. “They’re not saying maybe. They’re saying ‘definitely. I get it. If this exists, sign me up’,” he said. Which means the Liberal costing would leave a new government offering 500 spots “when 1.3 million Canadians are saying, ‘where’s my goddamn invitation?’”