You know what? I do hate Canada. Canada is really a creation of it’s government, after all, not of the people, and they’ve proven to be wildy avaricious to their citizens.
Who said anything about love? The government just wants them to shut up and obey orders.
As an American this is depressing, Canada was always me mental escape hatch. “Well I’ll just move to Canada if shit gets to bad here”
Which I know is hella reductive and not nearly as simple as it sounds, but who needs logic
Don’t fret - yet. At this point this is just some asshole at the National Post stating a dumbass opinion in light of discussions in the UK.
Let’s see what happens after 2025, though…I do know the CF has a very real recruitment problem right now. I have mixed feelings about the military, but I’m truly hoping conscription isn’t the road they go down versus, oh IDK, effectively dealing with sexual assault in the ranks and paying soliders a good enough wage that they don’t need to use food banks while training in urban centres - at minimum.
My wife is in the CAF, and when she heard about Sunak proposing this brain dead idea from our family in the UK, her first reaction was that nothing would fill her with more dread than the idea of working alongside a group of people who absolutely do not want to be there.
The idea that you could even get a draftee through the modern CAF’s training processes is laughable. I don’t think the average person has the slightest clue what it takes to be something like an Infanteer. The course has a 60% injury rate… As in 60% of each platoon will be injured badly enough that they’re taken off course and have to retry. It took my wife two attempts, and that was doing well. Some people at Meaford were on their fifth or sixth. She’s still waiting to find out if she has permanent nerve damage in her toe from one of the defensive exercises where she spent eight hours in manning a machine gun nest at night, lying in a puddle of water, in sub zero temperatures.
The nightmare they put you through on DP-1 is designed to weed out anyone who does not absolutely want to be there with a passion verging on insanity. Nothing is more important than knowing, with absolutely certainty, that the people standing next to you are just as dedicated as you are. That you can depend on them to stand with you, fight with you, and drag your ass out of there if things go really bad.
And we already know how to fix our recruitment; it’s the onboarding process. They recently opened up eligibility to people on PRs, and they got enough qualified applicants to completely fill our manpower shortfall. A year later all of them were still waiting for their security check and medical, and most had dropped out of the process because they couldn’t keep waiting. That’s why we have a recruitment crisis. People want to serve, but no one can wait a year to hear back from a job interview.
Well, that and the fact that members literally can’t afford housing next to the bases they’re assigned to because military housing is desparately underfunded and the civilian housing market is an investment portfolio for the rich.
Outside of gun control and health care, Canada is USA minus a few years. The same stupid cultural shit happens here too just a bit later
Moved from the USA over 25 years ago. Never moving back, though I visit. I sum it up like this: “Canada: better than the States—and no better than that.”
We sadly keep using the wrong yardstick. Or metre. I do like that we have metric.
Decent article but senseless headline. Nobody ever positioned mandatory service as a method to make Canadians love their country…
Maybe if the mandatory service were installing fiber to rural areas the way we managed to get copper out there or dealing with infrastructure (especially water and schools) in Indigenous and remote communities. Maybe health care or emergency response.
But guns and bombs? No thanks.
Also, I’m old enough to be exempt by any rational measure. If it came to a vote, my vote shouldn’t be counted.
I’m glad I’m starting to get to be old enough to be exempt for any mandatory national service but damn if that wouldn’t make this country worse overall.
I agree. I’m also not a huge fan of rebranding “military conscription” as “national service”. There have been people talking about “national service” in ways that specifically excluded military service. This feels like yet another case of the right stealing a term from the left and redefining it to suit themselves. It’s something they have been doing with national and religious symbols and slogans forever as a way to hide their true intentions.
One thing I find particularly concerning is that military conscription has generally been reserved for invasion or active defense. What are they not telling us?
