Give and Take

Founded in 1971, Canada World Youth was the brainchild of the Quebec journalist, author, publisher, inveterate world traveller, and future senator Jacques Hébert. It was an exchange program that brought young people from developing countries together with Canadians for six months of education, cross-cultural exchange, and work based on “social and cultural immersion, aimed at broadening the experiences and the viewpoints of individuals, as well as their outlook on the world and on the nature of relationships between persons and between peoples.” According to Mark Dickinson, who participated in the mid-’90s, CWY was not an aid-based development initiative but “something unique and without precedent.”

Typically, cohorts from such countries as Indonesia, Tanzania, and Guatemala came to Canada for three-month stints, joining with their counterparts on study tours, cultural sessions, and work projects. Then they would all depart for similar exercises in the exchange country. The program was demanding and intense, and living conditions were basic, as Dickinson shows in A School for Tomorrow, which charts the evolution of CWY through the experiences of individual participants. As might be expected of young people immersed in new cultures and faraway places, these were transformative times and — in retrospect — almost universally positive. “We didn’t really know how our lives had changed,” remembers one participant, “but we knew they had.”

The book conveys a certain amount of amateurism and last-minute improvisation that never quite left the organization. The selection of exchange-country participants was often problematic: some turned out to be from the privileged elite, hardly what CWY intended. Some were supplied by the military. A bunch from the Gambia turned out to be juvenile delinquents. Others simply vanished after they got home, leaving the visiting Canadians on their own. Overseas stays were frequently led by staff who themselves had never been to the country.

A lot of time was spent in Zen-like self-reflection, in which participants analyzed themselves and their interactions with others, to develop interpersonal skills and build group cohesion. “Instead of letting participants wrestle with issues or events on their own,” Dickinson writes, “this approach to non-formal education involves asking a series of questions in order to process a difficult experience, interpret and reframe it, draw lessons from it, and test those lessons through more experience. Dialogue and discussion, and the larger context of lived relationships in which those things took place, was key.” There are numerous passages like this.

In 2022, a Globe and Mail op‑ed called CWY Canada’s version of the United States Peace Corps. It was never anything like that. The closest Peace Corps analogy is CUSO, now known as Cuso International, which continues to send Canadians overseas to fill serious job requests. Dickinson contends that the clear difference between CWY and other international youth opportunities was its exchange aspect. So it’s disappointing that while his book describes at length the experience of Canadians, there’s almost nothing about the impact on other participants. They remain in the background, awaiting “a companion volume, or even several such volumes.” In that sense, this isn’t the story of Canada World Youth, as the subtitle promises. It’s mainly about Canadians.

Another shortcoming is in Dickinson’s treatment of the “work projects,” which included things like clearing cemeteries, milking cows, and volunteering in retirement homes or centres for people with disabilities. These tasks are incidental to the book because they were incidental to the purpose of CWY. It was the experience that mattered. And in that mismatch lies the germ of what finally brought the organization down.

Hébert was an old friend of Pierre Trudeau. They had travelled to China together and published a co-authored book about their journey in 1968, the year Trudeau became prime minister for the first time. His enthusiasm for Canada World Youth helped with initial government funding and then with long-standing support from the Canadian International Development Agency. Hébert, a consummate showman, believed in grand flourishes and arranged appearances at CWY events by important international leaders. In later years, Alexandre Trudeau, Pierre’s second son and Hébert’s godson, would lead the organization’s board.

CIDA, which merged with Global Affairs Canada in 2013, was more interested in development than in life-defining events for young people. In a 2020 project summary, GAC acknowledged the youth component of one $34-million contribution to CWY, but it emphasized its development results, noting that 526 volunteer assignments had contributed to improving “economic and social well-being of beneficiaries in six developing countries.” While nearly 85,000 had “accessed youth livelihoods training,” the program had also “increased capacity of local partners to deliver sustainable development results . . . through the use of the skills and expertise of Canadian volunteers.”

Nothing at all like this appears in A School for Tomorrow, which underlines a tension that festered between the organization’s understanding of itself and the demands of its primary funder. As staff tried to balance CWY’s foundational principles with CIDA’s increasingly strident demand for development results — and for a diversification of funding — Hébert, then well into his eighties, continued to meddle, demanding adherence to first principles and insisting that dependence on Ottawa “was simply the way things were.” Dickinson explains that Hébert “believed to the core of his being that governments everywhere should fund the program as an expression of their commitments to investing in young people.”

A School for Tomorrow focuses more on the destructive management squabbles these tensions engendered than on the amounts involved. For those numbers you need to search the Global Affairs Project Browser to learn that between 2009 and 2022 — a period when federal government funding was ebbing — CWY received more than $94 million. Given the circumstances, that’s a lot of money.

It’s odd that only three years after government funding ran out and the organization finally closed its doors, there are no CWY annual reports online, no financial statements, nothing that might show how much the governments outside Canada and other groups contributed — or how much money was raised by participants themselves. For that matter, there really isn’t much of a record of CWY’s achievements. Jacques Hébert himself wrote two early books about Canada World Youth, so A School for Tomorrow is a timely update. But in giving the experience of non-Canadians short shrift, it tells only part of the story. What we’re left with is the image of an expensive, self-indulgent initiative brought down by an increasingly demanding funder with different objectives. Dickinson nonetheless concludes, “Canada World Youth’s great accomplishment was to hold open a space for young people where good things were allowed to happen and all kinds of connections across different cultures were made.”