I Was a Teenage Katima-Victim

Les Harding is the author of Exploring the Avalon, Historic St.
John’s: The City of Legends, The Voyages of Lesser Men: Thumbnail
Sketches in Canadian Exploration and The Journeys of Remarkable Women:
Their Travels on the Canadian Frontier.

Katimavik is an Inuit word meaning common ground or meeting place.
Twenty years ago, some functionary in Ottawa dreamed up the concept of a
cross-country volunteer corps for Canadians between the ages of 17 and
21 and called it Katimavik. For the joy of working on a museum display
in British Columbia, helping out in an old-folks home in Ontario, or
building a nature trail in Quebec, each “Katima-victim” was paid the
princely sum of a dollar a day and given a thousand dollars at the end
of the program. At its height, Katimavik was active in 1400 communities
and had 20,000 participants or parts. The author was a male part,
really.

As Ferguson remembers, it Katimavik was a bizarre and grueling but
worthwhile experience for Canada’s disaffected youth. “The very
worst thing [about Katimavik],” he writes, “was the sincerity. The
officially sanctioned sincerity. The type that is dreamed up in
committees. The type that is handed down from above. I’m talking, of
course, about the designated committees: Active Leisure, Nutrition, and
Second-Language Learning.”

This is a very funny book. In the early 1980s, the author, a
19-year-old from northern Alberta, joined a motley crew of young
Canadians (names changed to protect the innocent) seeking to discover
Canada, and themselves; surprisingly, amid all the multicultural and
bilingual chaos, they did just that.