Nick Wasiuta and his dogs, Pompeii and Marcie, at home in Winnipeg, Manitoba. While working at a teen Christian overnight summer camp in Manitoba from 2011-2014, Mr. Wasiuta had only one hour of break time per day and one day off per week.Matt Horseman/The Globe and Mail
For many young Canadians, working at a summer camp is a chance to bask in nature, sit in the glow of the campfire and form new friendships. But the darker side of the experience is the burnout that can be triggered by round-the-clock, high-stress work conditions.
Four summers ago, 21-year-old Hannah Crilly, found herself facing long hours, pay below minimum wage and little real time off while employed as a counsellor in a management role at an Ontario hockey camp.
Ms. Crilly recalls coming down with the flu on the final week of camp and finding great relief in the opportunity to isolate away from her typical sleeping quarters – a room with short walls that young campers could look over.
The 24-hour break her illness gave her was the longest stretch of time off she was granted in weeks, an arrangement that breaches employment standards in Ontario.
“I was so exhausted that my body just gave out,” said the former goalie and current Trent University student, who was both responsible for caring for children and managing other counsellors at the camp.
Ms. Crilly is not alone. For counsellors, the joy of camp is often tainted by the increasingly complex behavioural needs of campers, low pay and a blurred line between work and rest, creating an environment that can lead to all-out exhaustion for young people away from home and the parental guidance they could lean on.
“You’re with these kids from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep,” she said, adding that even when she did have a precious three to four hours of break time a day, she spent it thinking about her next responsibility. Still, Ms. Crilly said her camp experience was not all negative. “You’re at a summer camp. It’s kind of hard not to find some fun moments.”
The conditions Ms. Crilly was contending with are not unusual, said Nadia Sapiro, a Toronto-based consultant who has become an advocate for better working conditions for camp workers. After finding out a teen she knew had to leave their sleepover camp job after just two weeks because of exhaustion, Ms. Sapiro created the Ontario Association of Camp Counsellors, a platform dedicated to informing counsellors of their rights and camps of the standards they are legally required to follow.
“The job has dramatically changed. The expectations have dramatically changed, but the camping industry has not changed how they treat their young workers,” Ms. Sapiro, 47, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
She emphasized that she is working to debunk the narrative that today’s camp counsellors are less resilient than past generations.
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Ms. Sapiro is sounding the alarm over summer camp pay and break structures, including a minimum wage and overtime pay exception for those legally defined as student employees at both non-profit and for-profit camps under Ontario’s Employment Standards Act. Ontario is the only province where for-profit camps are included in this exemption, but other legal caveats exist elsewhere. B.C. is an outlier among provinces in that it has set minimum daily wage rates for live-in camp leaders.
In practice, Ontario’s legislation allows camps to pay student employees any amount for their work.
“Because Ontario has the largest carve-out, Ontario has also enabled the largest camping industry in Canada,” Ms. Sapiro said.
Summer camps are also relying on a federal pathway to hire temporary foreign workers for counsellor roles without completing a Labour Market Impact Assessment, which opens up these work environments to non-Canadians who often do not know their rights, she said.
Ms. Sapiro’s association has sent letters to more than 100 camps to remind them of the minimum amount of time off they are legally required to provide to their employees. The Ontario Camps Association, the long-standing body that accredits camps in the province is “aware of questions being raised about employment standards and overnight camp operations,” executive director Joy Levy said in an e-mail to The Globe. The association “is reviewing those questions carefully and continuing to support member camps as they prepare for and operate the summer season,” she said.
Jeremy Herman, an employment lawyer who practises in Ontario with the firm Samfiru Tumarkin LLP, said that although there are minimum wage exceptions, employers must still provide the minimum break time outlined in provincial legislation. In Ontario, employers are required to give 30 minutes off within every five hours of work, at least 11 hours off each work day and 24 hours off each work week (or 48 hours off in a two-week work period.)
Despite those rules, a counsellor may feel they’re not in a position to demand their rights, he said. “It means that even if you have an employee and an employer who might say, ‘we explicitly agree to not be bound by the Employment Standards Act,’ that would be illegal.”
Although the rules vary across provinces, there is similar minimum break time legislation.
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A current day camp counsellor in Alberta told The Globe that she faced difficult conditions while working at a non-profit overnight outdoor education camp run by her current employer during the 2024 and 2025 seasons. The Globe agreed not to name the counsellor because of concerns about retribution from her employer.
The 21-year old, who is studying education at university, described being “on-call” six days a week while sleeping on bunk beds shared with young participants, sacrificing break time to ensure campers were always accompanied by two staff members – a policy to prevent child abuse – while managing sometimes violent behavioural issues, which intensified during her second summer at the camp after a management change.
After a particularly hard week, she recalls herself and a handful of her co-workers becoming emotional in a break room. They were all crying, she said, and when their manager walked in, she just looked at the group, then turned around and left the room. The soon-to-be educator emphasized the negative mental health effects of feeling trapped in these circumstances and called for increased child behavioural management training.
However, with a passion for helping children connect with nature, she also fondly remembers taking a young group backpacking for the first time. Campfire activities left the kids delighted. Memories like those helped her get by, she said.
Nick Wasiuta, a 36-year-old HR manager based in Winnipeg, also has conflicting feelings about his time as a counsellor at a teen Christian overnight summer camp in Manitoba between 2011 and 2014.
With an overwhelmingly positive experience as a young camper at a different camp marked by new friendships, it seemed natural for Mr. Wasiuta to work as a counsellor. But he also recalls the gruelling working conditions he faced.
Mr. Wasiuta said the job left him burned out ahead of another semester at university. With just one hour of break time per day and one day off per week during the job, he believes he would have been better equipped to advocate for himself if he had understood the psychological importance of minimum break times.
“In some senses it felt like those were the best summers of my life, and in some senses it felt like they were really, really hard,” he said.