CFS+: A Program Worth Restoring - And a Partner Ready to Help
I am the Executive Director of Computers for Schools Manitoba. I am also a product of this program. My schools received CFS devices. Post-secondary was not an accessible path for me. I started my career as a CFS intern, and I worked my way up to leading the organization. I say that not for sympathy, but because it matters for what follows: I know firsthand what this program does, who it reaches, and what disappears when it is gone.
On March 31, 2026, the federal government eliminated CFS+ funding through the Comprehensive Expenditure Review. We understand the fiscal context. Difficult choices were required across government, and we do not dispute that. What we are asking for is a closer look at whether this particular choice was the right one - because we believe the analysis that would support it was never done, and that an honest review would reach a different conclusion.
What concerns us as much as the decision itself is the process by which it arrived. Through the fall of 2025, affiliate organizations across the country were told that program renewal was coming. We planned around that assurance, made staffing decisions based on it, and communicated it to our boards. On January 29, 2026, a single paragraph was sent to our board chair informing us the program was ending. No meeting. No consultation. No transition plan. Sixty days later, it was over. A thirty-year program that tens of thousands of Canadians depend on deserved a more considered exit than that - and we believe it deserves a more considered review now.
We are here to make a case, in good faith, that this decision conflicts with the government's own stated priorities - and that C4SMB is ready to be the vehicle through which those priorities are advanced, if given the opportunity.
About CFS+ and Computers for Schools Manitoba
The Computers for Schools Plus program was a federal initiative delivered through a network of fourteen nonprofit organizations across Canada. Its model was straightforward: federal government departments and agencies generated surplus IT equipment - desktops, laptops, servers, phones, networking gear - that they no longer needed. Rather than paying for commercial disposal, departments transferred that equipment to CFS+ affiliates at no cost. Affiliates refurbished the devices, performed certified data destruction, and distributed them to eligible recipients: schools, libraries, nonprofits, Indigenous communities, and low-income Canadians who could not afford to purchase technology at market prices. The federal funding - approximately $6.9 million annually - covered the cost of that work: youth wages, operations, equipment, and training.
The youth employment component was not incidental. Under the companion CFSI program, the refurbishment work was performed by paid IT interns aged 15 to 30 - young Canadians who often faced barriers to traditional employment. Interns gained hands-on technical experience, earned employer-recognized CompTIA certifications, and left the program with credentials that opened doors in the IT labour market.
Computers for Schools Manitoba is the Manitoba affiliate. Based at 18 Terracon Place in Winnipeg, with a satellite location in The Pas in partnership with the University College of the North, C4SMB refurbished and distributed approximately 5,000 devices per year to eligible recipients across the province. Our intern cohort provided paid IT employment to young Manitobans who, in many cases, had no other clear pathway into the workforce. The federal program did not fund a charity. It funded a service - one that produced measurable workforce, digital equity, and environmental outcomes as a direct result.
The Need Hasnt Gone Away
CFS+ was built around three pillars: youth skill development, digital device access, and responsible e-waste diversion. The decision to eliminate the program implies, at minimum, that these needs have been sufficiently addressed. The evidence does not support that conclusion.
Youth Skill Development
Canada's youth unemployment rate stood at 13.3% in December 2025 - nearly double the overall national rate of 6.8%, and the highest it had been outside of a pandemic in over a decade.¹ The situation is significantly worse for racialized youth: Black youth unemployment reached 23.2% in early 2026, Chinese youth sat at 17.4%, and South Asian youth at 13.0%.² These are the demographics that C4SMB's internship program was specifically designed to reach - and the same demographics the government's own Youth Employment and Skills Strategy identifies as priority populations.
Nationally, CFS+ funded over 9,100 digital skills internships, with 82% of participants reporting improved employability as a result.³ C4SMB's interns earned CompTIA certifications, developed employer-recognized credentials, and entered the Manitoba labour market with skills that translated into careers. That pathway has been interrupted. The labour market conditions that made it necessary have not.
There is a broader dimension to this that connects directly to the government's own agenda. The federal government has committed nearly $2 billion toward sovereign AI infrastructure and established a dedicated Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation.⁶ Canada's emerging AI strategy is built around the goal that this technology should improve the lives of all Canadians. We share that goal. But realizing it requires more than compute infrastructure - it requires a pipeline of technically literate workers who can build, maintain, and work alongside these systems. That pipeline does not begin in a machine learning lab. It begins with a young person learning to image a hard drive, configure a network, earn a CompTIA certification, and develop the foundational competencies that every IT career is built on. C4SMB sits at the entry point of that pipeline. Cutting the program that builds the bottom rung while investing billions in the top of the ladder creates a structural gap the AI strategy has not accounted for. We would like to help close it.
Digital Device Access
Nearly 37% of Canadian households in the lowest income quintile did not own a home computer as of the most recent available data - drawn from the CRTC's 2019 Communications Monitoring Report, using Statistics Canada data collected in 2017.⁴ A device is not a luxury for these households. It is the prerequisite for employment applications, educational participation, access to government services, and economic participation in 2026. Without a device, none of those doors open.
Program data makes the gap more concrete. Among Canadians who received a device through CFS+, 52% had no access to a device at all before the program.³ These are not households on the margins of digital participation - they were entirely outside it. A further 27% of recipients reported that five or more people shared a single device in their household.³ And 42.5% of CFS+ devices remained in use three years after distribution - evidence that refurbished technology, properly matched to community need, delivers lasting value, not a temporary fix.³
What is notable about the CRTC household ownership figure is not just what it tells us - it is how old it is. In 2021, the CRTC redesigned its annual reporting framework. Household device ownership by income level was removed entirely.⁷ The 2017 figure is the last data point the federal government has published on this question. We are nearly a decade removed from the last time anyone in government formally measured how many low-income Canadians do not own a computer. It is difficult to declare a problem solved without measuring it. C4SMB's waitlists, client requests, and community partnerships suggest the gap remains real and present.
This gap matters more, not less, in the context of the government's AI commitments. AI participation requires a device. A household without a computer cannot access AI tools, cannot develop AI literacy, and cannot benefit from the economic opportunities the government's own strategy is designed to create. C4SMB is not an AI organization. We are the gateway - the organization that puts devices in the hands of Canadians who would otherwise have none, making every downstream digital investment accessible to the people it is meant to reach. The government's AI agenda and the CFS+ elimination are in direct tension with each other. We would like to help resolve that tension.
The reach of our device supply extends well beyond our direct recipients. Nonprofits, Indigenous organizations, school divisions, libraries, and settlement services have built their own programming around reliable access to affordable refurbished devices. Digital literacy programs, newcomer integration supports, employment readiness initiatives - these exist because organizations knew they could source equipment from us at a price point that made community programming viable. When C4SMB is disrupted, the disruption travels downstream through every organization that built its programs around our supply chain. The case for our continued operation is therefore not a case for our organization alone. It is a case for the broader ecosystem of community service delivery that depends on us.
E-Waste Diversion
Canadian e-waste more than tripled between 2000 and 2020 - rising from 252 kilotonnes to nearly 954 kilotonnes annually, according to a University of Waterloo study published in 2023.⁵ Projections reach 1.2 million tonnes by 2030. Despite this, less than 20% of Canadian e-waste is properly collected and recycled. IT and telecommunications equipment are among the top contributors by volume.
Every device C4SMB puts back into use is a device that does not enter the waste stream. Every device we responsibly decommission is handled with certified data destruction and environmental compliance. Over its lifetime, the CFS+ network diverted more than 19,000 tonnes of e-waste from landfills.³ The volume of federal surplus assets requiring responsible handling grows every year. The mechanism that was managing it, at no cost to the government, has been eliminated.
The data across all three pillars points to the same place: the conditions that justified CFS+ are still present. The communities it served still need what it provided. A funding decision that proceeded without a program review, without current data on device access gaps, and without an assessment of downstream impact on partner organizations did not have the full picture. We are ready to provide it.
A Closer Look at the Decision
The Program Was Not Reviewed - It Was Caught in a Sweep
Let us be clear about something that is sometimes misunderstood: C4SMB does not exist to sustain itself. The goal has always been to work toward a day when our services are no longer needed - when every young person who wants an IT career has a pathway into one, when every household that needs a device has one, and when federal surplus electronics find a second life instead of a landfill. We would welcome that outcome. We are not there.
What would make closing this program appropriate is evidence that the need has been met. A formal program review. Data confirming that device access gaps have closed. Youth employment outcomes that no longer require intervention. That evidence was not produced - because no program review was conducted.
In June 2023, ISED's own Audit and Evaluation Branch completed a formal evaluation of CFS+ and the CFSI program, as required every five years under the Financial Administration Act.⁹ Its first finding was unambiguous: there is an ongoing need for the Government of Canada to support Canadians through CFS+ in obtaining the necessary tools and skills to effectively participate in the digital world. That is ISED's own language, from ISED's own evaluators, published less than three years before the program was eliminated. Three months after that evaluation was released, Minister Champagne's office issued a statement celebrating the program's 30th anniversary.⁸ Eighteen months later, a single paragraph ended it.
A thirty-year program with a positive evaluation and confirmed ongoing need was not wound down through a program review process. It was caught in a government-wide expenditure sweep - a process designed to ask whether programs are expensive, not whether they are still needed. Those are different questions. We are asking for the second question to be asked.
This May Not Be the Saving It Appears
We understand the fiscal rationale. The Comprehensive Expenditure Review was a genuine effort to reduce government spending, and we respect that context. But we want to challenge the comparison being made, because we don't believe the two options are actually equivalent, even where the fiscal math might favour the alternative.
CFS+ was not primarily a grant program. It was a mechanism for converting a public asset - surplus federal IT equipment, purchased with public money - into public benefit a second time: a device in the hands of a student, a senior, a newcomer family, a nonprofit that couldn't otherwise afford one. When that same equipment is instead sold, whether through a commercial ITAD contractor or a public auction platform like GC Surplus, the transaction may generate revenue or reduce disposal costs, but the outcome for the public is fundamentally different. The device goes to whoever can pay for it, not to whoever needs it. Even a fiscally favourable sale converts a shared public resource into a private one. That is not a neutral change in delivery mechanism. It is a change in who benefits.
We are aware of at least one government body - Shared Services Canada - that moved toward this kind of commercial disposal arrangement, through a solicitation (R0000196758) that included a revenue-sharing component with commercial refurbishers.¹⁰ We raise it as one illustrative example of the shift underway, not as a claim about how every department now handles surplus equipment. We don't have visibility into that broader picture, and we want to be direct about the limits of what we know: we cannot say how each department is currently disposing of surplus assets, whether responsibly, commercially, or otherwise. That uncertainty is itself part of the point.
We are not asking the government to prove it is doing something wrong with these assets. We are asking it to recognize that a fiscal comparison which only counts what shows up on one department's ledger is not a full accounting of what changed.
What We Are Asking For
We are not asking for charity. We are not asking the government to sustain an organization for its own sake. We are asking for a review - a genuine, evidence-based look at whether this decision, made under time pressure in a broad expenditure exercise, reflects what an informed analysis of costs, benefits, and community impact would recommend.
We are asking for that review because we believe this government's own commitments point toward a different answer. The commitment to youth employment and skills development. The commitment to digital equity. The commitment to AI participation for all Canadians. The commitment to responsible stewardship of public resources. CFS+ advanced every one of those commitments at a cost that, on full examination, compares favourably to the alternative now being pursued. The program was not redundant. It was aligned.
C4SMB is not standing still while we wait. We are adapting our model, diversifying our revenue, and sustaining our mission with the resources available to us. But we are also making this case - clearly, directly, and without apology - because the communities we serve cannot afford for the right decision to go unmade simply because the wrong one was made quickly.
We are ready to be the vehicle through which the government resolves this contradiction. We have thirty years of operational credibility, a positive program evaluation on record, and a demonstrated ability to deliver outcomes that align with the government's own stated priorities. We are not asking to be rescued. We are offering to help get this right.
The door is open. We hope the government will walk through it.
Sources
1. Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey, December 2025, released January 9, 2026. statcan.gc.ca
2. Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey, February 2026 - racialized youth unemployment rates. statcan.gc.ca
3. Computers for Success Canada, CFS+ Data Overview (national program infographic). cfsc-opec.org
4. CRTC, Communications Monitoring Report 2019, Table 1.5 - Home computer ownership by income quintile, 2013-2017. crtc.gc.ca
5. Habib et al., A first comprehensive estimate of electronic waste in Canada, University of Waterloo / Journal of Hazardous Materials, 2023.
6. Government of Canada, AI Sovereign Compute Infrastructure Program; Budget 2025 - sovereign AI infrastructure commitments. ised-isde.canada.ca
7. CRTC, Communications Market Reports - 2021 reporting framework redesign. crtc.gc.ca/eng/publications/reports/PolicyMonitoring
8. Government of Canada, "Computers for Schools Plus program celebrates 30th anniversary," news release, September 26, 2023. canada.ca
9. ISED Audit and Evaluation Branch, Evaluation of Computers for Schools Plus (CFS+) and Computer for Schools Intern (CFSI) programs, June 2023. ised-isde.canada.ca
10. Shared Services Canada, Request for Proposal R0000196758, posted January 15, 2026. buyandsell.gc.ca
