So the problem here is that for some reason my controllers aren’t getting linked with components. I followed broerse’s advice from another question ( Loading Components when routing Ember 1.13 ) about using the view templates to call components which works really well. However, now any actions that a component’s layout uses don’t make it to the controller anyways. So I have to define actions within the component.
I guess I’ll have to dig around and maybe change the approach I have.