Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, honourable members.
Thank you so much for this invitation. We're delighted for this opportunity to share an exciting idea with you, which is a proposal for a new federal program: a youth climate corps.
I'm the team lead with the Climate Emergency Unit. I'm joined by my colleague Bushra Asghar, who is one of the lead organizers of the national campaign for the YCC.
I'm also the author of a book called A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, a book that maps out how to confront the climate crisis and is structured around lessons from the Second World War. During the Second World War, Canada had a population of about 11 million people. Remarkably, over a million Canadians enlisted. It was a truly extraordinary mobilization. Of those, 64% were under the age of 21. These young people left their farms, delayed their careers and deferred their studies because they understood the emergency to be in that moment, and they heeded the call to serve.
Today, in the face of a new defining generational challenge, there are, once again, thousands of young people who understand the severity of what we confront. They again want to serve, to enlist in this generational challenge, but this time, so far anyway, they have yet to be issued an invitation to do so by their government. I'm going to pass the mic to Bushra to outline our vision for what a youth climate corps could look like.