Let the Weird Sun Rise Again
Canadian Government: Bring Back Katimavik
At the end of 2010, while cleaning moose blood off an air mattress in a basement in Quebec City, I realized I had entered a parallel universe.
I realized it again inside a grain silo at dawn, and then again cleaning out a bin of rotten potatoes for my 11 roommates. It happened several more times in the absolute isolation of the boreal forest that winter.
You probably know someone who “did” it, and now you know one more: I “did” Katimavik, and with a little help from Justin Trudeau, more people might soon be able to say the same.
Katimavik, a federally-funded volunteer program for Canadians aged 17 to 21 that had existed in various forms since 1977, was eliminated in 2012 due to the Harper government’s budget cuts. Though my year suffered a few cuts in advance, I doubt my experience was different from anyone else who signed up: exhausting, sublime, a part TED Talk personal development seminar and part Big-Brother-as-directed-by-the-Coen-Brothers portrait of a country’s heartland.
Katimavik was—and remains, in its current, weakened form—pretty explicit about its ideology. It’s not hard to see why a federally-funded program getting youth to live communally and do unpaid work for social service centres wouldn’t sit well with the Conservatives. In fact, Katimavik had been cancelled once before, in 1986 by Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government.
This led Katimavik’s founder, former Senator Jacques Hébert, to go on a 21-day hunger strike. A sort of scrappy left-leaning spirit is written into Katimavik’s DNA, and indeed, the program was eventually restored to its former glory (after a stint as an outdoor training camp) in the ‘90s under Liberal PM Jean Chrétien.
But I don’t think it’s unfair to point out that there’s something nationalistic and even militaristic about Katimavik. I often heard it compared to the army (Katimavik actually did have a military option in the ‘80s), and after a few months I understood the comparison.
Our hours were regimented, our energy was constantly tested and thinking in groups rather than individual units became inevitable. We even had our equivalent of a furlough—48 hours of total freedom every three months, then back to service.
Add to this that Katimavik is not a program that will encourage people to critically reflect on the nation-state, politics of identity or class or indigeneity with much intensity.
Though it was only axed a few years ago, its chipper “we’re-all-in-this-together” attitude might seem a little outdated to people in its target age group today. And anyone who’s done Katimavik probably still remembers the “competencies” the program sought to instill, most of which would likely have sounded great to the Conservatives with a little tweaking.
The thing about Katimavik is that its mission is actually impossible. It’s good that it’s impossible. There is no way those competencies can be successfully instilled, no way the military or nationalist dimensions of the program can completely encroach on its participants, no way the structure of the thing won’t fall apart, because Canada is too big and the undertaking is too huge for it not to fall apart.
My group-mates and I knew which moments were corny and which were genuine. We understood, on one level or another, that the reality of the people we were working with or for was a concrete one that you couldn’t abstract from some feel-good principle.
What separated Katimavik from charity-tourism programs was how close to the ground the whole edifice was; being federally-funded and totally ramshackle, kids from any background could enter this parallel world and have some meaningful, self-directed give-and-take with the community they ended up in. I saw what a delight we were to the places we diffidently showed up to. We got more clam chowder and moose steaks than even 12 of us could eat.
Everybody deserves to experience something that’s so good for such murky, complicated reasons. Petitions calling for Katimavik’s return are full of inspiring stories of how it changed participants’ lives. I don’t doubt it for a second. But I also don’t think that’s the whole story; I don’t think that changes the final outcome.
What matters is that, for a while, there was an opportunity in Canada for any young adult to have a genuinely confusing, powerful experience. I hope Trudeau will bring it back for them.
