YOUTH CLIMATE CORPS UPDATED POLICY BRIEF 2026

Canada Needs a Youth Climate Corps
Overview

As Canada continues to experience record heat waves, raging wildfires and other climate disasters, no federal program exists to enable youth to play a meaningful role in addressing the causes and effects of climate change. A fully funded Youth Climate Corps (YCC) would send a clear signal that we are taking the climate emergency seriously, going beyond complex regulatory policy and giving Canadians an opportunity to implement practical solutions. Simultaneously, it would help address labour skills shortages and the youth unemployment crisis, and improve productivity.

YCC would require a Federal Budget commitment of $1 billion a year, ideally matched by provincial/territorial governments. If paying the prevailing living wage, such an investment would create about 20,000 jobs per year.  

In the 2025 Budget, the federal government promised to establish a two-year $40 million YCC pilot. This program should be stood up quickly, and rather than designing it on the basis of “doing a bit more of the same,” it should be built with benchmarks and mechanisms that enable a rapid scale-up of the program.