The Youth Climate Corps is a movement of young people and allies fighting for a future where everyone has access to good, green jobs and a livable planet.

Through grassroots organizing and diverse voices, we WON a $40M YCC pilot in Budget 2025. We are demanding a permanent, fully funded Youth Climate Corps by Budget 2026 as the nation-building solution to tackle rising youth unemployment and the climate crisis—while ensuring the pilot itself is fair, equitable, and aligned with our campaign principles.

While we won a pilot, we are still asking Prime Minister Carney and the Minister of Jobs & Families Hajdu, "Where is the Youth Climate Corps pilot that was promised?"

Send a letter to make our voices heard!

The Youth Climate Corps pilot is sitting on the sidelines as the government instead cuts public services, subsidizes carbon capture, builds pipelines, signs MOUs with Alberta for LNG projects, and clears the way for unregulated AI data centers, all of which will accelerate job losses, abuse Indigenous rights, and deepen environmental harm.

Though the Spring Economic Statement’s “Team Canada Strong” is a small step in the right direction, aiming to recruit 100,000 skilled trades workers and invest $6 billion in Red Seal Trades training, it fails to adequately address Canada’s most urgent needs: youth unemployment, climate breakdown, and the need to slash greenhouse gas emissions.

Canada does need major public investment in the skilled trades—but not primarily to serve militarization, fossil fuel expansion, and extractive industries. Young people need pathways into nation-building climate work that strengthens communities, lowers emissions, and builds sovereign and resource-resilient local economies capable of withstanding climate shocks, supply-chain disruptions, and economic instability.

The government continues to prioritize fossil fuel projects, LNG pipelines, and military spending, missing a critical opportunity to expand the Youth Climate Corps. The Youth Climate Corps should already be scaling beyond its initial 350-job pilot toward 20,000 unionized, living-wage jobs that equip young workers with skills our economy actually needs. If done right, this program would strengthen climate resilience while connecting young people to a sector projected to generate up to 700,000 new energy jobs in Canada — and potentially 2.7 million across the broader clean economy by 2050.

The continued delay of the Youth Climate Corps pilot represents a failure to invest in an intergenerational solution that would create good jobs today while strengthening communities against future climate and economic shocks.

Canada has the opportunity to build a nation-building program that creates good union jobs, strengthens communities against climate disasters, expands pathways into the skilled trades, and supports Indigenous-led climate solutions.

The government already made the promise. Young people organized and won that commitment. Now it must deliver.