Let's Close the Book on Coercive Voluntarism
We've been down the road of statist organizations promoting patriotism and nation-building, and it doesn't always end well.
Photo by Brett Sayles, Pexels
It’s that time of year again—when parents of graduating high school students get “the call” from their kids’ guidance counsellors warning that if the kids don’t log their “volunteer” hours they cannot graduate.
For students in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) this species of coerced voluntarism has been in effect since 1999. Most adult Ontarians appear to have stopped thinking about it, let alone debating it, or lobbying for change. But for young people, coerced voluntarism is their formative entrée into a culture of workplace exploitation that will almost certainly include unpaid internships, precarious gig jobs and side hustles, low wages, inflated credentials and all of the persistent economic disadvantages arising from the pretense—and here I am quoting from the TDSB’s community-involvement fact sheet—that their unpaid labour makes a “constructive contribution to the community” and “reinforces civic responsibility.”
Young people themselves know otherwise, of course. What coerced voluntarism has taught many of them is how to game the system—either by faking their community-service hours, or by finessing them. The condescension inherent in dressing up mandatory unpaid labour in the virtuous language of community service should embarrass adults, many of whom would not abide it themselves. The data on declining Canadian adult voluntarism (and the decades-long hollowing-out of historic civic organizations in particular) bear this out.
How, then, to explain all the earnest chatter in recent years about launching vast new “Service Corps” programs to mobilize young Canadians in yet more unpaid or ill-paid manual labour?
In 2018, for example, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau launched the Canada Service Corps (CSC), which bills itself as “a national movement to build a culture of volunteer service that empowers young Canadians to make an impact.” And just this morning (May 28, 2021), readers of the Toronto Star op-ed page were treated to former Liberal MP Sergio Marchi’s dream of a vastly expanded CSC. “It’s time to think big,” says Marchi. “[W]e must … earnestly invest in what Wilfrid Laurier called ‘our common patriotism,’ building a country of common ends and aspirations.”
Normally I wouldn’t toy with the intelligence of Decorum readers on the wisdom of mobilizing vast numbers of young people in statist organizations explicitly promoting patriotism and nation-building. We’ve been down that road, and it hasn’t always ended well. Yet Marchi’s own reveries about youth mobilization were explicitly inspired, not by Katimavik or the U.S. Peace Corps, but by his recollections of mandatory military service in Italy. How edifying it was, Marchi reminisces, to encounter “young military officers along village roads.”
No, the real problem with Marchi’s reverie is the dogged persistence of the idea that young Canadians have nothing better to do than take “sabbaticals” from real life and spend a year “contemplating their professional options” while venting their “youthful energy and idealism.” Are young Canadians even consulted on such schemes? Marchi does not state explicitly whether his vastly enlarged CSC would actually pay its young acolytes. Instead he focuses, in predictable manner, on the “adventure” and “character-building” it would promise, alongside opportunities for recruits to “build their resumes and networks.” When he does talk about material incentives, they are aimed not at young workers but at the institutions to which their labour will be indentured:
Imagine the good that would come in the service of their fellow citizens, and the cost savings to municipalities and organizations. Imagine how much our young citizens would grow from these experiences.
Here’s what I am imagining: a cohort of young Canadians straggling out of pandemic-imposed lockdown, Zoom classes, social isolation, poor employment prospects, rising educational debt, explosive stock-market and housing sectors that have all but excluded them, and above all, levels of public debt that may well leave them uniquely disadvantaged for decades.
If any such young people should happen upon Marchi’s Star column, I doubt they will be inspired by Liberal platitudes that date back to Laurier. They will be wondering instead whether the next stage in their experience of coerced voluntarism will take the form of national service.