1. The Company has been established in response to the economic, social and cultural needs of communities and to the desire of Canadians to volunteer their time and talents for constructive social change at home and abroad;
              2. The dominant goal of the Company is to help people and communities better their situations and tackle their own problems;
              3. The volunteers will work and live with those groups or communities who are their hosts. They will work with and not on behalf of these people;
              4. People in any situation have the right to make decisions about their lives and to evaluate their own positions. Company volunteers will respect this right.
              5. Volunteers will be partners with their hosts in a mutual learning and acting experience.
              6. Volunteers are not "professional helpers" and will not seek to impose their own solutions on people or communities. They will assist other people in articulating their own problems and in working on them.
              7. Where projects conform to the spirit and criteria of the Company, there will be no hesitation on the Company's part in seeking volunteers, whether the project is submitted by a governmental department, a private group or any other community organization.
              8. The Company council and its staff will support its volunteers, but it will not identify itself with issues in which volunteers are involved.
              9. The volunteer should be the primary decision­maker in the Company of Young Canadians.
              10. The project should allow the volunteer a maximum degree of freedom in deciding his own techniques and in using his own initiative and independence.
              11. The Company will support projects which will hopefully help to alleviate the causes of problems and will not simply "bandage" a symptom.
              12. Volunteers in the Company will choose their own assignments in consultation with the staff.

              Written by a young reporter with the Calgary Herald who served as the director of information for the Company until its political assassination in 1970, this was an insider's story that relates primarily of its bureaucracy and administration.
              In June of 1966, 56 young people had been invited to attend sessions that were to prepare them to become the CYC's volunteers in the field.
              "They were an odd assortment," he writes. "A good many of them were straight middle-class products. . . . There was another group that came from more diverse backgrounds, men and women who had been through other than normal experiences. . . . Added to these two groups was a group that was difficult to define. Some called them hippies, others thought they were just kooks. But the only way to look at them is as individuals. Al Burger was one ~ 'a cheerful anarchist' was one way he was described. . . ."
              The following is verbatim from the book:

              These projects were the Company as it could have been.
              Along with a few others, they represented the dream of the CYC. The young people had worked miracles despite the cynics. They had accomplished, despite the efforts of some of their own people to hinder them. And they had guts, enough guts to take a shellacking and come back for more.
              The Lesser Slave Lake project was one example.
              Al Burger and Jeremy Ashton arrived in Faust, Alberta in August 1966. Faust is a backwoods community about 200 miles north of Edmonton. It has a population of about 800, of which a majority is Metis, and a weak economy consisting of fishing, logging and mink ranching. The economy was for the whites; most of the Metis were on welfare. The CYC was invited in to help organize recreation for Faust's teenagers, hardly a radical role, but Burger and Ashton soon turned it into a controversial one.
              Through late 1966 and into 1967, they worked at the recreation job ~ starting a mens' basketball team, helping to start the Faust youth organization for teenagers, trying to start a Boy Scout troop. They also attempted to improve relations between whites and Metis. Trouble was not long in coming. In February, 1967, 45 townspeople met in the Faust community hall and debated running the two volun­teers out of town. The discussion was heated and the complaints numerous.
              One man charged that the volunteers were dirty, unkempt, lazy, rude and proponents of Communism. Others agreed.
              "He's rude, doesn't wash often enough and wears muddy boots in other people's houses," said one woman about Burger.
              The worst charge came from the man responsible for bringing the CYC into Faust.
              "They have floundered around, without any clear-cut objective, just getting people mad," he said.
              Not everyone was mad, though. The Metis community rallied to their support, as did several whites.
              "Those fellows may not have accomplished much in a practical sense, but at least they got us thinking and talking and looking," one supporter said.
              A Metis woman remarked, "They are interested in us, in our problems and our needs. For the first time in 40 years, I think the Metis problem is being recognized here and those boys are responsible."
              Responsible they were and they paid for it. Burger was pulled out of Faust by the Company; the Company didn't have much choice. Ashton stayed for a while, but eventually left as well. It seemed that the whites had won their victory in Faust, but it didn't turn out quite that way. The Metis community circulated a petition asking them to come back and in July they responded. Not many people would have gone back. The white community tried for months to drive them out and when they succeeded in April, the project seemed doomed. Ashton and Burger showed a toughness that other volunteers lacked. They also cared enough to recognize their mistakes, admit them and try to correct them. The project would fluctuate from this time on, but no one could ever doubt the devotion of Burger and Ashton to the principles of the Company and to the metis community in Faust.

              The author completed the book as follows:
              "The Company of Young Canadians is a testimonial to the failures of the system that created it to deal with failures, then obstructed it at every opportunity.
              "The Company of Young Canadians never was a company of young Canadians.
              "March on children."

              A Toronto Star reporter related: "The Company of Young Canadians has been called 'the most ambitious piece of social legislation in North American history.' In creating the CYC in 1965, the Pearson government sought to enlist the idealism of youth to correct inequalities in Canadian society. Yet four years later, the Company was virtually disbanded amid charges of subversion and anarchy within its ranks. . . ."
              This reporter ended her book this way:
              "Only if one could somehow tally up all the swipes at the local power structure that the CYC has led to, directly and indirectly, and then somehow prove that more swipes would have been taken at the power structure more successfully without a CYC, could I ever characterize the Company of Young Canadians as a failure."

Verbatim from the book:

              There are those who would say that [CYC volunteers were co-opted] by the established agencies by [their] emphasis on presenting a favourable image to the 'power elite,' [that] led inevitably to feelings of futility about the work. In any case, if [some were] co-opted by the Establishment, there were at least two prairie volunteers who resisted co-optation with a passion. They were Al Burger and Jeremy Ashton, who worked in the northern Alberta Metis community of Faust.
              "Faust had real possibilities," Michael Valpy recollected with fondness. "I often felt that if the revolution were going to come, it might come in Faust."
              Burger and Ashton did many of the things the good community organizer is supposed to do ~ they identified the community and its natural leaders, identified the issue, brought the issue out into the open. Yet their project was plagued. by public misunderstanding of what the Company was, and what community organizing is. It was identified publicly as a disaster for the very reasons that made it at least a partial success.
              Faust is a backwoods community on the south shore of Lesser Slave Lake, about two hundred miles north of Edmonton. Its population of eight hundred is about three-quarters Metis. Their lives are governed by a benevolent paternalism at best, and cruel degrading racial discrimina­tion at worst, that suits the stereotype of Mississippi more than Canada. The white people of Faust were fond of saying they'd always got along with the Metis before Burger and Ashton came to stir things up, and in their own ugly way they had.
              "The Indians and Metis creep around on the fringes of things, invisible," Burger and Ashton wrote in the CYC Newsletter shortly after arriving there. Alan Clarke remembers being sickened by the poverty, squalor and filth of the Metis' living conditions ~ literally across the railway tracks which divide the tiny town ~ despite his years of experience in the depressed rural and northern areas. "It was the worst I've seen in Canada," he said.
              The community had a failing economy based on some fishing, logging and mink ranching, and an enormous welfare rate, mostly Metis. It had been described as a ghost town in which people are still living. The white people wanted things changed enough to "contain" the basic problems (to use the radical jargon), but they didn't want basic change.
              "The status quo cannot be maintained if this community hopes to survive," was how Faust merchant Fred Pruden put it to a Globe and Mail reporter. "No one realizes this more than the white population who make up the business people here. We need industry to provide jobs, and we need an organized programme of recreation and leisure activities to stop the spread of immorality among our teenagers.
              "In an attempt to attract industry, we have requested the federal government to declare this a Designated Area. On the second count, we asked the CYC to give us a hand with our teenagers. I believe this shows that the whites haven't been sleeping at the switch."
              The Faust Community League and the Faust Indian and Metis Progress League joined forces in the summer of 1965 (while the CYC was still on Duncan Edmonds' drawing board) to ask for two keen young volunteers to organize a recreation programme that would keep the area's youngsters out of trouble.
              Al Burger and Jeremy Ashton arrived in August 1966, filled with the social-action rhetoric of their training at Antigonish. Burger was a short, bearded pipe-fitter from Coquitlam, British Columbia, who had joined the Company because "sooner or later, a person gets the urge to change things or make it a better world. This is a chance to do just that." Ashton, a blond beanpole of a dropout from the University of Western Ontario, had said of the Company: "Perhaps it will get me closer to my goal in life ~ to somehow do something for man and make my life useful."
              They researched the socio-economic situation in their area in somewhat more detail than did most of the early CYC volunteers. They spent a lot of time with welfare officers, Indian Affairs people, sociologists at the University of Alberta, the RCMP, provincial Forests and Fisheries Department staff, the Indian Association of Alberta, the provincial Department of Youth, and the province's Community Development Branch, to whom they were loosely responsible under Doug Lawrence's system of 'resource persons.' They also made a more-than-average effort at meeting the grass roots ~ playing cards, visiting people, spending their time in the beer parlour and so on.
              The "spread of immorality among our teenagers" that Fred Pruden had mentioned was indeed a problem of major proportions, with a high incidence of drinking, fighting, promiscuity, and breaking and entering. That year three thirteen-year-old Metis girls had illegitimate babies. "We've arrested thirteen-year-old Metis boys who were so drunk they couldn't stand up," an RCMP constable said. But it was equally true that the organized recreation programme the town wanted would clearly be what the Company staff were fond of calling "a Band-Aid solution" to a serious social problem ~ what Doug Ward had referred to as "the old get them swimming at the Y and they won't masturbate' approach."
              Say the Aims and Principles of the Company of Young Canadians:
              When our volunteers go into a community, they must not bring "solutions" to the local problems. . . . Related to this is the need to steer clear of quick "solutions" which might produce a community less offensive to the eyes of society, but not necessarily a healthier one; therefore, our volunteers attempt to serve communities within the context of trying to bring them fully into a democratic process. . . . The Company supports projects which will alleviate the causes of problems and not simply "bandage" a system.
              The root of the problem in Faust was racial discrimination, and the powerlessness of the Metis to determine their own lives. The philosophy of the Company ~ the rhetoric that Alan Clarke had suggested nobody was really listening to, when Parliament approved the Company ~ was being tested on specific grounds. The outraged reaction from the whites of Faust was predictable: they said Burger and Ashton were "stirring up trouble" with the Metis, and they tried to run them out of town.
              A mink rancher who led the campaign to get rid of the boys was also a leading opponent of equal rights for the Metis. As Burger pointed out, this man often made statements to the effect that "coloured people are inferior" and the like. Of course that had nothing to do with why he wanted Burger and Ashton out. That was because they were dirty, lazy, rude and proponents of communism. Communism? "They talk about social change," he snarled. "Social change to them means socialism and socialism is the first major step to communism."
                            The boys were "anti-authority, anti-establishment trouble makers," and what's more, "they turned their backs on the white community and began fraternizing almost solely with the Metis residents."
              Said garage operator Mel Beamish: "If their purpose was to unsettle this community, then they've done a good job of it. They've been nothing more than a bloody nuisance since they arrived."
              The whites of Faust had got more than they bargained for, as Faust Community League president Wilf Ruecker made clear: "They have floundered around without any clear-cut objetive, just getting people mad. We wanted them to work with our teenagers, and they just haven't done it. They've been a big disappointment."
              The white townspeople, faced for the first time with a hostile, no longer acquiescent native population, began putting pressure on the CYC, directly and through Alberta Community Development, to get Burger and Ashton the hell out of Faust.
              Press coverage of the situation ~ even when it tried to be fair to both sides, as in a detailed Globe and Mail article by Ron Hayter, showed a total lack of comprehension of the nature of Community Development. Hayter wrote critically of the lengthy periods of time the boys spent in the beer parlour, for instance. He quoted Burger as saying, "The place to meet people in Faust is in the pub," as though that were a touch of flippancy on Burger's part. In fact, it was a simple acknowledgement of one of the first rules of community organizing ~ you go where the grass roots are.
              Hayter also reported the volunteers' claim that they helped start the Faust youth organization, but added that after they got the club going they left it to run its own affairs ~ something which might be an indictment of a YMCA worker but not of a community organizer, whose goal is to get organizations to the stage where they can function without him. He reported the volunteers' claim that they attempted to improve relations between Metis and whites by getting representatives of both communities on the Community League executive. Then he added a remark from League president Ruecker that, although the change had taken place since the boys came to town, it was the people's idea, not the volunteers. But if a community organizer is doing his job correctly, of course, all such ideas come from the people.
              Defending himself against the townsfolk's complaints, Burger said: "The Metis people are beginning to look at this community and want some of the power over their own lives. We help them." That, he said, is "the only reason I can see why some of the white people are against us."
              A Metis leader, Mrs. Alice Cunningham, put her finger on the crux of the situation when she said: "For the first time in forty years, I think the Metis problem is being recognized here, and those boys are responsible. They are interested in us, in our problems and our needs."
              As another Metis put it, at a town meeting where the volunteers were attacked: "You are picking on the CYC activities here. But that's not what this argument is about. The argument is about the fact that you, a white person, don't want the CYC here. I'm a Metis and I do want them here. "
              When the crunch came, Ottawa decided to side with the people who didn't want the CYC there, for the moment at any rate. They pulled Burger, the more volatile of two volunteers, out of the town, ostensibly to do "research" in Edmonton. Ashton stayed but with strict orders to stick to youth work and recreation. So much for the proud rhetoric of the Aims and Principles, it seemed; but Alan Clarke has said: "There seemed to be a lot of factors clouding the issue. It wasn't that clear-cut." Neither Clarke nor Doug Ward could remember exactly who decided that Burger would leave, "but it seemed like the best thing under the circumstances," Clarke said.
              Jeremy Ashton left the Company a few months afterwards; and after things had cooled down considerably, Al Burger returned to Faust. He had married another CYC volunteer, Alona Erickson, who was re-assigned to the Faust project with him. Both Burgers were among the few early volunteers to serve out their full two-year terms. Even the most hostile whites admitted that Burger "seems to have settled down" since he married Alona. The state of militant confrontation over the race issue had dissipated, but the project expanded into several scattered communities around Lesser Slave Lake, and became one of the CYC's strongest, most successful projects. Nevertheless, the damage in terms of bad publicity had been done. Newspaper readers remembered only that townspeople had actually run Company volunteers out of the town they were supposed to be helping.
              It would appear that volunteers were doomed when they didn't rock the boat, and doomed when they did.