That's a great question.
There are a lot of community-based organizations and citizen science groups in Canada. An example might be the lake partner program in Ontario, in which citizens have been going out and measuring water quality in their lakes for decades now. This said, there are real gaps across the country, and organizations like this need to be supported. They're very efficient at what they do in terms of cost efficiency and their ability to reach a wide number of lakes. It's just a really good way to do it.
I'll say that one of my first jobs out of high school was with an environmental youth corps in Ontario, and it was a great experience. I think it's great to provide training to young people, but at the same time, I absolutely agree with you that these youth can be harnessed to help collect this sort of monitoring data.