Canada-U.S. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc, left, and Quebec City Mayor Bruno Marchand are both Canada World Youth alumni.The Canadian Press
Mark Dickinson is the author of A School for Tomorrow: The Story of Canada World Youth. He teaches in the School for the Study of Canada/École d’études canadiennes at Trent University.
Some ideas are so good they deserve to come around again.
Consider the case of Canada World Youth/Jeunesse Canada Monde. In 1971, a group of prominent Canadians concerned with rising levels of inequality, misunderstanding and conflict came up with an ambitious scheme.
Led by Québécois writer, publisher and future Senator Jacques Hébert, they designed a global youth exchange program that offered a radical new approach to how people around the world could talk to one another.
What followed was one of this country’s most significant contributions toward building global peace and stability in the postwar era. Canada World Youth deserves to be counted alongside Lester Pearson’s call for the creation of an international peacekeeping force and General Roméo Dallaire’s advocacy work for global human rights.
At the core of Canada World Youth’s educational mission was a formula so perceptive of human nature that it could have been discovered anywhere at any time.
Opinion: The sad demise of Canada World Youth, our country’s version of the Peace Corps
Every young Canadian who participated was paired with a young person from another part of the world. With six other “counterpart” pairs, they formed a single exchange group. That group was sent to two small communities, one in Canada and the other in an exchange country, for three months or more at a time. In those communities, participants lived with local families, learned their languages, and built understanding and respect for each other’s customs and beliefs.
Just as participants were put into pairs, so, too, were staff, partner organizations and entire nation-states. Costs and responsibilities were shared, in some cases equally, and in others according to the means available to the country partners. This was not an aid program, but a genuine reciprocal exchange, carried out for mutual benefit, organized around a carefully negotiated set of protocols.
Young people everywhere showed that the trust placed in them was warranted. Whether in a longhouse in Malaysian Borneo, a small town in Saskatchewan or on a dairy farm in Uruguay, they learned how to adapt to circumstances beyond their control, make meaningful contributions to the communities that hosted them and see the world through other people’s eyes.
“Without Canada World Youth, I wouldn’t have learned about other parts of Canada and come to understand that there are so many different points of view,” said Frances Cartwright, who at 18 went from Vancouver Island to Saint-Félicien, Que., and then onto Tunisia. “I learned that there were so many people I could love out there in the world.”
Between 1971 and 2015, some 80,000 young people from 70 countries participated in this unique experiment in building global understanding. The relationships they formed have lasted to this day. “I never thought we’d still be talking 30 years later,” Margareth Siahaan told me. Ms. Siahaan was 20 when she left her hometown of Jakarta for the Quebec/Indonesia exchange.
Canada World Youth alumni went on to make substantial contributions to their societies. Notable alumni in Canada include Bruno Marchand, current mayor of Quebec City; Dominic Leblanc, the minister responsible for Canada-U.S. trade; Andrew Creeggan of the Barenaked Ladies; Giller Prize winner Johanna Skibsrud; and Wánosts’a7 Lorna Williams, the Lil’wat elder and leading figure in the revitalization of Indigenous languages.
While there were oversights, setbacks and very rare tragedies – a car accident in Côte d’Ivoire; a drowning in Indonesia – Canada World Youth should be remembered as a spectacular humanitarian success. It proved that the foundations for global stability are not only conceptually possible but practically achievable.
Yet Canada World Youth deserves more than just a eulogy. It is time to revisit this unique project and consider how it might be modified and adapted to meet the needs of our present moment.
Opinion: Canadian youth should have a universal gap year
“Young people are very concerned about the direction our world is going in and want to make a difference,” said Alice de Wolff, who organized the first exchange with Tanzania and went on to lead the National Action Committee on the Status of Women. “The dwindling range of opportunities available to them feels like a mismanagement of one of our most precious resources. Canada World Youth showed how to trust and mobilize the energy, creativity and willingness of young hearts and minds.”
Canada World Youth reminds us that deep understanding between peoples cannot be created on a digital platform nor mediated by an algorithm. A livable future depends on our ability to cultivate real-life, in-person relationships where we can look into one another’s eyes, learn about each other’s lives and create a better world one conversation at a time.
“All of us are more connected than ever but this world seems more fragmented than ever,” said Ram Viswanathan, who grew up in a working-class family in Chennai, India, and participated in the British Columbia/India exchange in 1982 before rising up through the ranks of IBM. “Could a program like Canada World Youth play a role in bringing us back into healthy relationships with one another?”
As we pivot away from the United States and look to strengthen our alliances with other nations, surely a program of this sort has an important role to play in creating the social context out of which specific political initiatives might emerge. Any attempt to solve global challenges could be built on the bedrock of genuine friendship. Former executive director Matthew Pearce put it this way: “Why isn’t everyone doing this?”
In his 2024 book The Peace, Mr. Dallaire called for the establishment of “a formal rite of passage” that would give young people out of high school a chance to build relationships with their global peers.
Canada World Youth fits the bill. Any educational program that takes strangers from around the world and turns them into family deserves a place in our collective conversations about how to build a better tomorrow.