The Canadian Political Class Is Ideologically Incapable of Rebuilding The Military

Prime Minister Mark Carney has an ambitious goal to rebuild the decrepit Canadian Armed Forces, but multicultural liberalism and recruitment are mutually incompatible.

The Canadian Military’s Recruiting Crisis

The Canadian Armed Forces – which refer to themselves as the CAF, pronounced exactly as it’s spelled – recently leaked its intention expand its reserves from the current, anemic 22,000 to 400,000 soldiers. At first I wondered if an extra 0 was added to that number as a typo, but the plan is to grow the Army reserve to 100,000 and the supplementary reserve (which I hadn’t even known existed, and is currently composed of retirees) from a few thousand to 300,000. Further leaked details are that the 300,000-strong supplementary reserve will be created by essentially drafting civilian Federal employees, training them in driving trucks, marksmanship, and drone flying, which really just sounds like the makings of an absolute clown show.

At the same time, Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney has committed to a considerable increase in the CAF’s budget – over $80 billion spread over the next five years, with 2025-26 spending rising to around $62B from the previous average of around $35B – with the goal of reaching the 2% of GDP level that NATO members are expected to (but in practice usually don’t) maintain. As part of this build-up, the CAF is hoping to reach its authorized strength of 71,500 uniformed personnel.

These ambitious new aspirations are striking given the context of the CAF’s long-standing recruitment crisis. With the exception of 2025, when the CAF received a bump thanks to the Elbows Up reaction to Trump’s trade war and Canschluss trolling, the CAF hasn’t even been able to hit the relatively low recruitment targets of around 7000 per year, averaging around 4000 or so most years. This year, even with the Trump bump, the CAF barely made its numbers, celebrated in the press as a ten-year high and therefore a great victory.

Attrition from the regular forces has averaged around 4800 per year for the last twenty years or so, roughly comparable to recruitment. Between 2020 and 2024, attrition was higher than recruitment, with the result that the regular forces have lost around 4000 troops net, about 6% of the current strength of 65,700. The pattern continued in 2024-25, with over five thousand soldiers leaving the military, slightly higher than in the preceding few years.

A recent Angus Reid poll indicates that there is very little enthusiasm for military service amongst Canada’s population. Only one in five Canadians would volunteer no matter the reason if their country called them, while 40% would refuse service under any circumstances.

Young men are even less likely to be potentially willing to unconditionally volunteer than old men, while being far more likely to refuse to volunteer under any circumstances (of course, women are almost universally aghast at the idea of serving). Contrast this to World War 2, when about 1/3 of fighting-aged men volunteered.

Governments that find it impossible to motivate their young men to volunteer for military service, but need their warm bodies in uniform anyhow, have historically resorted to conscription. Since they are manifestly not interested at the moment, the political class has begun floating trial balloons about mandatory military service in its media.

Except for a brief period at the end of the Second World War, this has never been necessary in Canada, because Canadian men have always flocked to the flag to fight for their country when their country needed them. When the government did institute conscription, it resulted in riots in Quebec.

A recent Angus Reid poll found that there is broad support for conscription ... but only amongst those parts of the population who wouldn’t be forced to serve. The young men who would actually be made slaves of the state are generally against the idea. Young women (along with, to be fair, women of every age but the elderly) are overwhelmingly opposed to the idea, no doubt in part because they sense that conscription in a feminist society would scoop up as many women as men, and whatever they say about equality, women are not, in general, eager to crawl around in the mud while .50 cal rounds zip over their heads.

The same poll found that there was much broader support for forcing young people to spend a year working in health care, environmental protection, and civil protection, which isn’t terribly surprising as such forms of service strike most people as a lot easier than the military. Frankly, given the high youth unemployment that has resulted from Canada’s high immigration rate, a lot of youth probably just think that in this case they’d at least have a job for a while.

Just because conscription would be unpopular doesn’t mean that the government won’t reach for it, of course. More or less by definition, conscription has never been popular. It is, however, very far from ideal. Conscripts don’t tend to make the most enthusiastic troops. Their morale tends to be low, their enthusiasm non-existent, and their propensities to shirk their duties, avoid danger, surrender, and mutiny are all much higher than those of the committed volunteer.

On the same day that the ambition to get 400,000 Canadians into uniform was leaked, the First Woman To Be the Chief of Defence Staff, Gen Jennie Carignan, attended a ceremony of apology for the CAF’s history of systemic racism and racial discrimination. Gen Carignan broke down in tears at the lectern, overcome by the numinous ecstasy of the Spirit of Saint Floyd washing her soul clean of sin.

Canada’s senior military officer, for some reason.

Carignan’s emotional incontinence elicited mockery from the Internet. Historian Darryl Cooper – best known for his Martyr Made podcast¹ – had the best take: “She’s crying? I’m crying watching this video after spending months reading about how the Canadian soldier was one of the fiercest monsters to haunt the trenches of the Great War.”

Of course, I got in on the fun myself, and in the process discovered that I’d been blocked by the official Canadian Armed Forces X account.

It’s possible that it’s because of something I said.

Now I’ll admit, I’ve said some harsh things about the CAF from time to time. I’m going to use a lot more harsh language in what follows. This comes from a place of love. I was raised in a military family. My father was a reg force veteran and, later, a reserve infantry officer; he revered the martial traditions of Canada to an almost religious degree. My paternal grandfather was a career soldier and a World War II vet; my maternal grandfather was a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot during the war, and his father was a cavalryman in the Great War. My mother is a veteran. My brother is a combat veteran. As a teenager, I joined the Army cadets as soon as I was old enough, and then joined the militia as soon as I was old enough for that, so technically I’m a vet too ... though I was only in the infantry reserve for a few short years, in part due to the disappointment engendered by a military that, even then, felt increasingly like a dilapidated kindergarten. The Canadian military is close to my heart, and seeing its current state is like watching a beloved family member succumb to drug addiction and homelessness.

Back to the weeping general. She has an interesting backstory. Following her elevation to the apex of the military chain of command, RUMINT² surfaced to the effect that she had demonstrated cowardice in the face of the enemy. The story goes that in 2019 she was deployed to Iraq, where she was placed in charge of a NATO training school. In January 2020 her position came under rocket fire and she panicked, had her luggage (including a collection of carpets she’d purchased) packed aboard a helicopter, and attempted to evacuate the base before the troops, thereby earning her the designation “Iraqi Evaci”. Her attempted desertion was supposedly stopped at the last minute by a senior American general, who chewed her out and ordered her back to her post. Shortly after that she was relieved of her command and returned to sender, only to be promoted a few months later to take the newly created position of head of “Chief Professional Conduct and Culture” ... informally known to the troops as the DEI division.

I have no idea whether the rumour about the Grandmother-General’s attempted desertion of her post is true or not. Naturally the rumour is officially denied, but then it would be: the Canadian government can’t come out and say “We’re promoting cowards in the name of inclusion”. What isn’t controversial is that Carignan’s previous position as CPCC was explicitly intended to ram DEI down the CAF’s throat in a process referred to internally with the bland bureaucratic euphemism of ‘culture change in the defence team’. Between 2020 and 2024 Carignan was responsible for leading this ‘culture change’ in the form of struggle session/consciousness raising workshops, mandating diversity quotas for hiring and promotion, genderqueering the uniform substandards, establishing a snitch culture for reporting microaggressions, providing a high standard of gender-affirming care, and making sure that the men’s room was fully stocked with tampons.

Support for tampons in the men’s room is not, however, universal.

Over the period from 2019 to 2025, polling data from Angus Reid demonstrated that pride in the Canadian military collapsed. In 2019 almost 80% of the Canadian people were proud of their military; in 2025, just over half were.

The reluctance of Canadians to serve in the military is likely related to the elite culture that elevated a weepy old woman to the top of the Canadian military. Most of the drop in pride occurred after 2021, corresponding precisely to implementation of ‘culture change’ in the Armed Forces. The temporal coincidence between culture change, the steep decline in military pride, the recruiting crisis, and the exodus service-members suggests that these factors are causally linked: that disinterest in military service is driven more by white conservative men disgusted by the broken joke of the woke Armed Farces (you heard me), than it is by liberal hijabis agitated by the military’s ostentatious, self-flagellating soul-searching over its sins against racial and sexual inclusion. That said, it’s worth noting that continuously wallowing in the military’s supposed hate culture of isms and phobias is almost guaranteed to alienate both groups: conservatives read that, accurately, as indicating a hostile woke culture they want no part in, while liberals take it at face value and get scared off by the scary stories. As one female retired major (who knew Gen Carignan back in basic) put it, the CAF needs warriors, not DEI hires.

It can’t be ignored that Canada’s population has become dramatically less Canadian in recent history. Bangladeshis, Punjabis, Gujaratis, Han Chinese, Arabs, Somalis, and the rest of the charcuterie board of multicultural mystery meat served up by our airports simply do not have any authentic connection to the land, people, culture, traditions, and history of Canada. Why would they fight for a country they don’t really think of as their own? By and large, they don’t: the Canadian military is still overwhelmingly white and male.

The Canadian government has worked hard to systemically alienated the native population. Official state ideology is that Canada is a post-national multicultural state with no core identity built on stolen native land by genocidal settler-colonialists. As such, there’s nothing to defend. There’s no there, there: no identity to identify with, no boundaries of culture to justify the borders of political geography, no in-group to defend against an outgroup. No nationalism without a nation; no patriotism without patria.

Reinvigorating Canadians’ willingness to serve their country and rebuilding Canada’s military into a force that can win wars would both require the Canadian political class to repudiate the ideological territory of globalism, feminism, multiculturalism, mass immigration, and gender-bothering that they have made themselves synonymous with. However, they can’t reverse course without discrediting themselves, and so, they won’t. Fixing the recruitment crisis is therefore a coup-complete problem: it cannot be accomplished absent wholesale replacement of Ottawa’s political class. We only need to look south of the border for demonstration of this. Until 2025, the American military was suffering from precisely the same recruiting woes as afflict Canada and Great Britain, due entirely to a collapse in interest amongst America’s traditional warrior class: white rural Southern men.

The ascendant Trump replaced the shapeless blob Lloyd Austin as the Secretary of Defense with the young, energetic, crusader-tattooed Pete Hegseth as the Secretary of War (and that difference in terminology matters). Recruitment rebounded immediately, with the US Army alone exceeding its 2025 goals by 61,000, four months ahead of schedule. Including reserves, the US military as whole recruited about 325,000 new personnel in 2025, with each branch either hitting or exceeding its recruitment targets (which were also 10-20% higher than in 2024). Adjusting for population ratios, this would be the equivalent of the CAF recruiting 32,500 personnel in one year.

Admittedly, the MAGA coup in the US is far from complete, and its survival and success far from assured. Nevertheless, the immediate reversal of the American recruitment crisis following a change in senior leadership can’t be denied, and strongly suggests that replacing left-wing multicultural globalists with patriotic right-wing nationalists is the single most effective recruiting tool given a political context in which young men have been radicalized towards the right.

Given the length of this article, in the spirit of bottom-line up-front, here is a rank-ordered summary of the measures that would need to be taken for Canada to build a large, professional, and strong military, arranged in order from what I consider to be the most to least important measures. First, as already discussed, change the leadership: fire the diversity hire Chief of Defence Staff, and put an actual patriotic warrior in charge instead of some political creature. Second, provide a clear, compelling mission that both promises adventurous young men that they will see action, and that this action will be in the unambiguous interests of their people and their country. Third, fix the absurd security screening bottleneck. Fourth, drop woke like a hot potato, meaning specifically: reverse the feminization of military culture, stop trying to recruit women, minorities, and non-citizens, and focus on appealing to the core war-fighting demographic of young nationalistic Canadian men. Fifth, dramatically raise fitness standards and enforce proper uniform standards, in order to make the profession of soldiering physically and aesthetically aspirational. Sixth, pay soldiers well, provide them with better housing, equip them properly, and provide them with better working conditions. Seventh, stop abandoning veterans to their fate and take care of them for a change. Eighth, make effective recruitment propaganda in the form of compelling movies and TV series that mythologize Canadian military heroes and celebrate military culture both historically and in contemporary settings.

With the exception of increasing pay and military spending, these solutions are ideologically precluded by the multicultural, post-national globalist liberalism embraced by Ottawa’s current dominant political class. As such, absent circulation of this elite, a strong military is functionally impossible. Insofar as a strong military is an essential element of national security, Ottawa’s political class is therefore a clear and present threat to Canadian security.

Before getting into the rest of this absurdly long, 12,000 word essay, I’d like to take a moment to remind you that putting all of this together was a whole lot of work: researching, writing, editing, revising, hunting down images, all of it in an iterative process that’s eaten about two weeks of my life. That is work by one human, me. Not one word of this was shat out by an LLM (though I did query Grok for some of the research, albeit, I will emphasize, not without confirming what it told me). In the process of thinking about nothing but Canadian military recruitment for two weeks I’ve come close to psyopping myself into applying to join the CAF. With the pay raise they’ve been given, and my educational level, I’m pretty sure I could come in at captain and be making six figures, which is, I would like to emphasize, a lot more than I’m making as an independent blogger. Anyhow. As always, I could have put everything that follows behind a paywall, but I prefer it when people read what I write, and the absurd length of this article is already intimidating enough that I doubt many people will read this monstrosity. Just know, I could paywall, but didn’t, because I have faith that you, my generous and supportive reader, to step up, even when you don’t have to, for no other reason than that it is the right thing to do, or at least that they would prefer to keep me writing instead of going on an officer training course.

With that out of the way, let’s get on with it.

A History of Neglect

Canada’s military was not always a punchline. At the end of World War II Canada had the world’s third-largest navy, complete with our own aircraft carrier, and over a million men under arms. Since then military spending has steadily declined, from a high of around 7% of GDP in the early 50s to around 1% today, where it’s hovered since the end of the Cold War.

Canada is protected to its east and west by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, both of which are patrolled by the powerful navy of the friendly superpower to the south, the only country with which Canada shares a land border, which we have long bragged is the longest undefended frontier in the world. Our only other neighbouring country is Russia, and while Russia is a decidedly unfriendly superpower, in practice Canada’s populated south is separated from the Russian Federation by thousands of kilometres of howling arctic wastes which provide an even better natural defence than the oceans.

Cozy and secure in our continental cocoon, Canada has allowed its military to atrophy into a vestigial appendage akin to the stubby wings of flightless birds on isolated Pacific islands, useful only for emotive displays. So far as the Liberal Party is concerned, ‘emotive display’ is, indeed, the only real purpose of the military. Ever since Lester B. Pearson³ was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing the concept of ‘peacekeeping’ to de-escalate the Suez Crisis (thereby helping to drive the final nail into the coffin of the British Empire), the Canadian military’s primary purpose has been to conduct third-world relief missions. Peacekeeping carries no particular benefit to Canada, but it is of great benefit to politicians, who get to preen in front of the camera as important humanitarian statesmen. The purpose of the Canadian military isn’t to win wars, to defend the country, or to conquer distant lands: it’s to make Liberal Party politicians feel good about themselves.

When the CAF fails to live up to its making-liberals-feel-good mission, Canada’s liberal establishment reacts like a frustrated child taking out her vindictive cruelty by throwing her dolls against the wall. The Somalia Affair is probably the best example of this dynamic. The Canadian Airborne Regiment, an elite commando unit whose core competencies were jumping out of airplanes to break things and kill people, was deployed in Somalia with the contradictory goal of keeping a non-existent peace, a mission to which they were singularly ill-suited. Somalis being Somalis, the Airborne base was immediately subjected to continuous infiltration and theft. A handful of the violent lunatics in the regiment reacted by capturing thieves and torturing them to death, which they had the poor sense to document with photographic evidence; later, photographs emerged of one of the airborne troopers wearing a moustache man t-shirt while raising his arm at a prohibited angle, which wasn’t criminal exactly but was very bad PR. Instead of punishing the guilty troops individually, for instance with field courts martial followed by summary hanging, the Liberal Party flew into a rage and disbanded the regiment for having committed the unforgivable sin of making them look bad. This dragged on in the media for years, sullying the honour of not only the Airborne Regiment but of the entire military. The Somalia affair unfolded over thirty years ago, but the liberal establishment holds it over the heads of the CAF to this day.

In addition to providing politicians with regular hits of the pleasantly addictive buzz of telescopic philanthropy, peacekeeping also has the great advantage of being cheap. Not only does peacekeeping not require all that many troops, you don’t even need tanks, fighter jets, destroyers, or aircraft carriers to distribute aid packages to refugees. Therefore the Canadian military essentially does not have these things. The CAF has a grand total of 112 forty-six-year-old Leopard II main battle tanks (of which roughly half are down for maintenance at any given time), a whole 138 forty-two-year-old CF-18 Hornet fighter jets (of which 89 are operational), twelve Halifax class frigates (of which about half are in drydock at any given time), an intimidating four Victoria class diesel-electric submarines (which are forty-five years old, and all but one of which is out of commission), and zero bombers, zero attack helicopters, zero destroyers, zero troop transports, zero battleships, and zero aircraft carriers. The pathetic size of the Royal Canadian Navy is particularly embarrassing given that Canada has the longest coastline in the world, at 243,042 kilometres, essentially all of which Ottawa expects Washington to defend on its behalf. Airlift capacity is so limited that the CAF essentially cannot deploy overseas without allied logistical assistance.

By contrast with its decrepit armaments, the CAF has 145 generals: it has more generals than it does tanks. This top-heavy general staff is only about a third the size of the US military’s, despite the American military being 20x larger by personnel and 32x larger by budget.

From the perspective of the Laurentian elite, a weak military is actually a political advantage. If Canada effectively does not have the ability to project military force, Ottawa can simply plead lack of capacity when America asks for assistance. It enables Canada to duck out of involvement in America’s various imperial wars, letting Washington shoulder the burden of the Pax Americana while chirping from the sidelines about how the big bad bible-thumbing American bully is so mean, and how peaceful, ethical, liberal, humanitarian Canada is so nice because Canada spends its money on healthcare instead of bombs. It isn’t a morally superior position, of course: it’s simply shameless dependence and shameful parasitism.

What Is the CAF’s Mission?

Why the abrupt urgency to rebuild Canada’s military?

The report in which the CAF announced its hopes for a massive expansion in the ranks provides the following motivation:

In order to assure the defence of Canada against domestic threats ranging from a low-intensity natural disaster response to high-intensity large scale combat operations, the DMP [Defence Mobilization Plan] will be developed to empower a timely and scalable WoS [Whole of Society] response by achieving pre-conditions for the expansion and mobility of the CAF.

Maybe this is just clumsy writing, but the plain meaning of “domestic threats” is not, on the surface, threats from foreign adversaries such as Russia or China. The statement would instead seem to imply that the Canadian government is anticipating the need for kinetic operations domestically, which is to say, on Canadian soil, and possibly against Canadians.

One possibility is civil war. That sounds nuts, but there’s a large and vocal separatist movement in Alberta. Albertans have nursed grievances against Ottawa for generations due to the Laurentian elite’s propensity to sabotage economic development in the province (for instance by blocking pipelines), while looting the province to redistribute the fruits of its oil wealth to economically underperforming provinces (at this point in Canada’s managed decline, that is every province but Alberta). There is very little upside for Alberta’s continued membership in Confederation, and Trump’s offer of statehood looks increasingly tempting to many in the province.

Alberta leaving would bankrupt Ottawa, therefore Ottawa cannot accept this outcome. In Ukrainada, I sketched out a speculative scenario in which Alberta becomes Canada’s Donbass, with Carney taking on the role of a North American Zelensky standing up to America’s Orange Putler, possibly as an element of a deliberate globalist strategy to defeat MAGA in detail by drawing it into a Canadian quagmire while also provoking civil unrest in the US, attacking the US economy, and so on.

I still think a shooting war between Ottawa and American-backed Albertan separatists is a far-fetched and highly theoretical scenario, but there’s no question that Ottawa is whipping up anti-American sentiment, radicalizing the boomers, and trying to build up the military. The trade war has not calmed things down in Alberta, which just saw the largest separatist rally in its history, drawing thousands of supporters to the provincial legislature. On the other hand, a petition opposing separation recently gathered almost half a million signatures, and support for independence is still only at 30% of the population. So it’s possible that the “domestic threat” Ottawa is worried about is Albertan separatism, but as things stand the Wild Rose province is a long way from declaring independence, and it’s hard to see the situation escalating to military conflict any time soon.

Quebec separatism, which was once a real threat to confederation, is now an even more distant possibility. Support for sovereignty has fallen off quite a bit since the 1990s, and is substantially lower amongst young Quebecois than older demographics. Ottawa’s strategy of bribing the province with federal funds, while mollifying nationalist sentiment by giving the provincial government wide latitude in its immigration policy (as a result of which Quebec remains noticeably whiter than the rest of Canada), has paid dividends for national unity.

Another domestic threat that might be keeping Ottawa’s politicians up at night is insurgency from the general Canadian population. The boomers are all in for the Liberals, naturally, as are the migrants that have colonized Canada’s urban centres. Young Canadians, however, are increasingly embittered against an entrenched political elite that has delivered nothing but poverty, displacement, lectures about how they deserve every bit of it for invented historical atrocities the political class refuses to produce evidence for, and Brantford Salutes with both elbows up.

As a direct result of the growing disaffection amongst young Canadian men, radical underground groups such as Second Sons have started to form. Second Sons are still quite small, have certainly not yet engaged in any form of violence, and are not in any meaningful sense a terrorist group. They are, to the contrary, a fraternal organization and a political activist club. However, Second Sons is growing rapidly, and its members are young, fit, militant, and determined. Many of them are veterans of the GWOT. Their profile seems to align with the predictions of a leaked RCMP report, in which the Mounties confronted the cold reality that the government had completely broken both the economy and any sense of social cohesion, that this was not going to be repaired any time soon, that the Canadian people were going to be furious when it sunk in for them just how badly they’d been betrayed, that this was liable to lead to the formation of radicalized anti-government groups, and that the RCMP simply did not have the resources to deal with such a situation. It’s not hard to suspect that a group like Second Sons emerging right on schedule has Canada’s elites feeling a bit jumpy.

There is precedent in Canadian history for its military being deployed internally in order to crush domestic dissent. In the 1970 FLQ (Front de libération du Québec) crisis, martial law was declared in Quebec in order to suppress radicalized sovereigntists who had abducted two politicians (one of whom they executed). In the 1990s, the military was deployed to deal with the Oka Crisis, a land dispute with a Mohawk band. When the Freedom Convoy brought Ottawa to a standstill, Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, which was basically kind of martial law (the Emergencies Act replaced the War Measures Act that Trudeau père activated to suppress the FLQ). It was rumoured (though of course officially denied) that Justin tried to get the military to intervene, an order which they supposedly refused⁴.

So maybe the military buildup is intended to be turned against ‘domestic terrorists’, which of course will have a very broad definition. Words are violence, remember. Then again, unless that insurgency escalates into some kind of Great White ISIS of the North, it’s difficult to envision that being a problem requiring ‘high-intensity large-scale combat operations’.

Another possibility is that the report was simply badly written, and the expected target of ‘high-intensity large-scale combat operations’ is not domestic at all, but Russia. In addition to the billions of dollars of munitions that Ottawa has contributed towards the Ukrainian war (largely draining Canada’s shallow armaments stockpiles in the process), the CAF is currently maintaining (with great difficulty) over 2000 troops in Latvia as part of a NATO deterrence effort. Ottawa’s politicians show no more intention of drawing down the war than their delusional and equally poorly-armed counterparts in the EU, and indeed they show every indication that they’re doing their best to prolong the conflict and even provoke Russia into expanding it. So perhaps Carney wants a bigger military so he can feed young Canadians into the Ukrainian meatgrinder, the better to replace Canada’s heritage population with subcontinentals. This might not be quite as crazy as it sounds: Ottawa is very concerned about Russian incursions in the unprotected Arctic, and keeping Russia tied up in Ukraine diverts Moscow’s attention and resources away from Canada’s northern frontier. Should the Ukrainian front collapse, Russia may well decide to help itself to Canada’s Arctic archipelago in order to control northern shipping routes; responding to this could well necessitate high-intensity combat operations on Canadian soil.

The final possibility is that Ottawa is worried about an American invasion. This isn’t completely crazy, given the trade war and Trump’s 51^st state jokes. It is, however, insane from an operational perspective. If the US wanted to conquer Canada, it could do so before next Tuesday. The fact that they haven’t done this suggests that they have no intention of doing this, but even if they did, a larger CAF wouldn’t do much to stop them. Besides, as I outlined in Maple Maidan, the most likely annexation strategy is to use economic and cultural pressure to move Canadians towards wanting union with the United States.

If Canada can be bankrupted (which is quite plausible), and if that bankruptcy can be plausibly pinned on Canada’s political class (which is easy because it’s true), it may be possible to place Canada into the position Scotland found itself in after it bankrupted the kingdom with a failed New World colonization attempt: begging for union with its wealthier neighbour to the south in exchange for its debts being paid. Building up Canada’s army does nothing to protect against that. If anything, piling more debt on top of Canada’s already crushing debt burden accelerates the timeline towards bankruptcy. A cynical man might wonder if accelerated national bankruptcy is exactly what Carney is trying to achieve.

A military buildup requires a clearly articulated mission that is sufficiently compelling to a substantial fraction of the population that they will sign up for service. Ideally there are clear victory conditions. In the Great War and World War Two, the mission was defending the empire and defeating Germany: once Germany was defeated, the war was over and the men could demobilize. The American case for war in Vietnam was sufficiently compelling that, even though Ottawa refused to contribute to the war effort, around 30,000 Canadians went south to volunteer to fight (comparable to the number of Canadians who fought in Afghanistan). In the GWOT, the initial rallying cry was the desire for revenge against Islam for 9/11; mission creep towards impossible, open-ended objectives like ‘building democracy’ and ‘making Afghanistan safe for feminism’ ultimately soured the warrior class on the war. Peacekeeping has historically been a terrible motivation, because no one really cares about it.

The CAF’s most recent (2024) defence policy document, Our North Strong And Free, frames the CAF’s mission in a mess of neoliberal blather that is as compelling a call to arms as a communique from the regional director of human resources. The mission described in that document is 1) to assert Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic against Russian and Chinese ambitions, 2) to participate in continental missile defence, 3) to fight climate change and respond to natural disasters, and 4) to safeguard “global Canadian values” and ensure the integrity of the “international order” against the destabilizing influence of state and non-state actors (such as Russia and China) who do not share those vague, undefined “values”. The first and second items are meaningful defence goals, however both threats are rather distant, and missile defence doesn’t require much in the way of personnel and therefore won’t motivate large numbers of young men to sign up. The third item is essentially putting out forest fires, which is hardly what most young men have in mind when they think of military service. As for ‘values’, upholding girlboss absolutism, open borders, and anal maximalism is about as inspiring as Disney’s latest box office bomb. We already did that stuff in Afghanistan, and we aren’t doing it anymore.

Of course, all that stuff about ‘values’ is mostly just moralistic camouflage for defending the financial interests of Canada’s globalist elites. That kind of hypocrisy isn’t effective anymore. People see right through it. It would probably be more effective to try being honest for a change, and tell potential recruits: we’re going to go kill people so we can take the stuff we don’t break in the process, and for your trouble we’ll cut you in on the take.

Perhaps the CAF should consider sending kill teams after fentanyl-trafficking narcoterrorists in Central America. This is a mission with clear bad guys, who present a clear threat to continental security. Better yet, announcing a crusade to liberate first the United Kingdom, and then Western Europe from Islamic occupation and the grip of the tyrannical governments that enabled that occupation would have young men beating down the doors of the recruiting stations. Of course, the current Canadian government would never do anything like that, as it fully supports the EU’s ethnic replacement policies, and implements them domestically itself.

The Security Screening Bottleneck

The recruiting problem is at least partly driven by regime paranoia. A recent auditor-general report revealed that security screenings have become a significant obstacle to potential recruits, taking up to a year in some cases. This is about twice as long as the US military takes. A majority end up withdrawing their applications before the process is even completed, half of them within two months of applying. Only 1 in 13 applicants is successfully recruited.

This suggests that the problem isn’t actually attracting people to the recruiting office: a couple hundred thousand Canadians were at least interested enough to start the recruitment process over the last few years. The problem is that interested applicants get frustrated and move on with their lives.

This was not a problem in the recent past. Until the 1990s, the only security checks that were performed were criminal background checks and verification of citizenship. Following 9/11 security screening protocols steadily expanded. The government now worries about terrorist affiliations, ‘ideologically motivated violent extremism’ or IVME, and penetration by foreign influence operations. All of this requires intelligence agencies to dig through applicants’ social media accounts, credit scores, travel history, and so on.

This is entirely a problem created by multiculturalism. Previously, the loyalty of a Canadian boy to Canada was presumptive. In the mass immigration era, the public is filled with people whose pre-political ethno-religious loyalties supersede loyalty to Canada. Muslims may have sympathies to the Muslim Brotherhood; Sikhs may have sympathies to Khalistanis; Tamils may have sympathies to the Tamil Tigers; Chinese may be working as agents for the Chinese Communist Party. Multiculturalism requires the military to pretend that this mismatch between prepolitical and political loyalty is not a factor at scale, thereby prohibiting systematic exclusion of groups with unreliable loyalties; operational security requires therefore requires individual security screening.

Meanwhile, the tensions created by mass immigration have turned a significant fraction of the native population against the government that has forced demographic change upon them. The IVME category is essentially meant to target the ‘far right’ without directly naming it, whose opposition to immigration, along with impatience with tangential culture war issues such as feminism or gay rights, places them in an adversarial stance to the official ideology. This is particularly perverse because the ‘extremists’ of the ‘far right’ are, by definition, the most patriotic subset of the population; they are overwhelmingly young and male; and they are often (due to the ‘far right’s’ fitness culture) in superior physical condition to that of the general population. Security screenings intended to weed this element out exclude what should be the single best pool of motivated, high-quality recruits. If you think about it, ‘ideologically motivated violent extremist’ is practically the definition of a soldier.

None of these issues would be problems in an ethnically homogeneous nation-state in which the people and the elite are ideologically aligned, but they become unavoidable concerns for the “tolerant”, “inclusive” post-national state, which must deploy invasive, baroque security screenings in order to avoid recruiting agents of foreign powers, terrorist organizations, and disaffected natives radicalized by the government’s own policies. There’s a direct parallel with the security screening procedures that were implemented in airports following 9/11: since a multicultural state cannot simply ethnoreligiously profile Muslims (or, better yet, simply ban Muslims from travelling), everyone who travels must be assumed to be a potential terrorist, and subjected to the same invasive procedures.

These measures are also probably not very effective in practice (again, just like airport security screening, which doesn’t actually catch terrorists). Examining every recruit with sufficient care to uncover foreign agents inserted into the Canadian body politic by state intelligence agencies of adversarial foreign powers requires a degree of thoroughness that would effectively grind recruitment to a halt, while the kind of cursory screenings that would be consistent with an efficient and rapid recruitment process would not catch anyone with even basic opsec. Moreover, security screenings cannot account for pre-political loyalties: just because the Sikh applicant isn’t formally a member of an underground terrorist organization doesn’t mean that he won’t prioritize Sikh interests over Canadian interests. As but one high-profile example, during the embarrassing route from Afghanistan in 2021, Canada’s then-defence minister Lieutenant-Colonel (retd.) Harjit Sajjan diverted special forces personnel to evacuate Afghan Sikhs with no ties to Canada, at the expense of Canadian citizens still in the country, thereby endangering Canadian lives in preference to those of his coreligionists.

Ottawa is trying to address the security screening bottleneck by allowing applicants to start basic training on a probationary basis as they wait for CSIS and the RCMP to rifle through their lives. AI solutions, for instance using natural-language processing to digest social media histories, are also being explored. How effective this will be remains to be seen. AI has been an absolute disaster in private sector HR, resulting mainly in the mass rejection of qualified applicants. It isn’t difficult to envision a scenario in which the AI red-flags a large proportion of applicants for spicy jokes on social media, resulting in them getting kicked out of basic training.

In the end, streamlining security screening is a complicated solution to a problem created by the regime’s own ideology. Remigrating Canada’s surplus paperwork population would make security screenings largely unnecessary: ‘right wing extremism’ would become a non-problem overnight, and you don’t need to worry about Islamic terrorism in the ranks if you’re just not recruiting Muslims.

In any case, while the security screening bottleneck is a barrier to those who are potentially interested in military service, fixing the problem by streamlining the process does absolutely nothing to increase the pool of potential recruits.

The Great Military Awokening

Young men do not only join the military because they are patriotic. In general this kind of idealism is a rare thing. Much more common is a more primal motivation: the desire for adventure, for glory, to be tested and found worthy of joining an elite brotherhood of hard and dangerous men.

The CAF in its current form struggles to offer this. What young man sees a lumpy elementary school principle in a general’s uniform blubbering about how horrible it is that soldiers used rough language and told insensitive jokes, and is inspired to think ah, yes, that is precisely the kind of leader of hard men that I would follow to the gates of hell? To the contrary, Carignan’s performance tells them that they would be signing up for an extended course of incessant nagging by unpleasant harridans far more concerned by the misgendering of the cross-sex hormone-gobbler that has to be carried the last seven point nine kilometres of the eight-klick ruck march when xer fat little legs give out than she is by the gender goblin’s inability to complete the ruck. Young men want to be challenged by demanding and dangerous training, not challenged to overcome the implicit biases of their internalized transphobia.

When you see CAF soldiers in the wild, they are frequently obese and slovenly. This is not mere perception: an internal report found that three-quarters of uniformed peoplekind are fatbodies.

When I joined the infantry reserve in high school, I expected that it would pound my cookie dough ass into hardwood. Instead I found that NCOs were no longer allowed to give PT as punishment. “Drop and give me 50” was a violation of our human rights, so instead of disciplinary infractions becoming a tool to anneal the spirit and toughen the body, they were punished with passive-aggressive “red chits” that went in your permanent file to harass you for the rest of your career.

It was all very feminine-coded, and that is no accident. The CAF was forced to admit females to the combat arms in 1989, and since women cannot meet the fitness standards that men can reach, women were simply held to a lower standard. For example, I remember the females being allowed to do ‘girl pushups’ with their knees on the ground. The problem with a double standard is that it is very difficult to hold one while simultaneously claiming that girls can do anything boys can do better. If women can’t match the physical standards expected of male soldiers, then what the hell are they doing in uniform? The only possible answer is ‘because equality’, but double-standards refute equality by their very existence.

Therefore in 2013 the CAF swept this embarrassing reality under the rug by implementing the gender-neutral FORCE (Fitness for Operational Requirements of Canadian Armed Forces Employment) evaluation, which is of course actually much worse than the previous double standard. Since women can’t match male performance, performance benchmarks were reduced across the board to a level that women can reach. The FORCE evaluation is supposedly meant to evaluate fitness in terms of military specific tasks such as sprints for fire-and-movement or lifting sandbags, rather than more traditional and direct measures such as number of pushups, number of pull-ups, time to run a certain distance, and so on. Officially, leadership insisted that FORCE was not a reduction in standards at all, and how dare you imply that it is, but after FORCE was introduced, the CAF got fat, so they’re obviously lying. Rather than pushing soldiers to achieve an exceptional physical standard, the CAF contents itself with verifying that soldiers are barely capable of performing at the bare minimum, and so, by and large, the bare minimum is what they don’t even achieve.

I’ve seen reports that basic training is apparently now a de facto “no fail” system in which one earns the cap badge as a participation trophy, due to pressure on instructors to pass recruits in order to keep numbers up. Can’t finish the ruck march? No problem, there’s a truck you can ride, hop on in, no one will judge you. It’s hard to judge how prevalent this is, but wokeness is invariably corrosive to competency, so this would not be surprising if true.

In an effort to boost recruitment numbers, the CAF has been dropping standards across the board. The previous division of applicants into categories of ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ based on their medical and psychological status has been replaced with a third category, ‘fit for task’, which essentially means ‘eh, so you have a prescription for anti-anxiety meds ... good enough’. Aptitude testing has also been dropped in favour of the so-called ‘fast pass’ which accepts civilian credentials at face value under the dubious proposition that a bachelor’s degree is a reliable proxy to intelligence and competence.

The net result of all of this is to reduce the quality of human material being recruited, while reducing the quality of training they receive, thereby ensuring that when Canadians see their military they are not presented with the glorious flower of their youth, but with the sad-looking dregs scraped from the bottom of the barrel.

No one with any self-respect wants to be a part of that.

It’s worth emphasizing that front-line infantry units, such as the Royal Canadian Regiment, the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, or the Royal 22e Regiment (the Van Doos), continue to maintain much higher internal standards of fitness than the non-combat trades. The fat troops that civilians see on the street or at public events are logistics, signals, administrative personnel, and so on. However, infantry units are garrisoned far from population centres at remote bases like CFB Petawawa, and therefore kept out of the public eye. As a result, the internal cultures of these infantry regiments – maintained more or less in defiance of Ottawa’s emphasis on DEI over readiness and performance – does absolutely nothing for the military’s public image.

A high standard of physical fitness serves as an advertisement for military service. It presents soldiers as a masculine elite, and carries an implied promise to young men that it will carve them into precisely that kind of elite. This has a magnetizing effect on the kind of young men who are psychologically suited to combat. The current FORCE standard seems to be more of a minimal acceptable level of military fitness, rather than an aspirational ideal. Widespread obesity suggests that even this low standard isn’t met in practice. Instead, physical fitness standards should be set at a level such that they would be challenging for an athletic young man in his prime.

A large group of fit young men will catch the eyes of the ladies, which is the real reason that ‘women love a man in uniform’, and it of course follows that this is in itself a point of attraction for young men. However, that also brings up the question of the uniforms themselves.

Under Trudeau, standards of dress were relaxed almost to the point of elimination. Just as fitness standards were discriminatory to women, uniform standards were discriminatory towards Muslims, Sikhs, and gender horrors. This was sold as a way of being more inclusive and thereby attracting more ‘non-traditional’ recruits, but it’s actually a recruiting problem. Soldiers in public are walking advertisements for the military. If they look like fat sacks of shit who just got vomited out of a hipster burlesque show, then this is how the military will be perceived, and it will turn people off. It’s exactly the same principle as putting obese black women in lingerie ads and thinking that this will bring in customers.

At the same time that fitness standards should aim at the highest ideal rather than the lowest common denominator, strict uniform standards must be reapplied. A soldier should have a ‘look’: he should be identifiable as a military man even when in civvies, simply from his bearing, his haircut, and his facial hair.

Mix-and-match gender queering must come to an end. No more long pink hair, no more scruffy beards. To a certain degree, the military has already partially reversed the humiliating excesses of the 2022-2024 era, but this is mostly in the way of insisting that long hair be tied back, hair be short enough that it is in principle possible to wear a helmet, beards be kept well groomed, and vivid primary colour hair dye be covered when in the field so as to avoid drawing the attention of snipers. This is still embarrassing.

Religious modifications to uniforms absolutely must be phased out. If Sikhs are allowed to wear turbans because this is their sacred tradition, the implicit message is that their sacred tradition is more sacred to us than our sacred traditions, namely the regimental headdress each soldier is privileged to wear. If our sacred traditions are not sacred to us, then they are not sacred at all, and we are revealed as a fundamentally unserious people whose standards mean nothing. I single out the Sikh turban because this was the thin end of the wedge: it was foisted upon the Canadian military in the 1990s, against its vociferous objections, and was the first sign of standards collapse that culminated in the pink hair of today.

The primary reason that young women have traditionally loved a man in uniform is because of what that uniform signifies: physical fitness, strength of character, courage, aggression, and all the rest of the masculine qualities which women find attractive. Again, this is why high fitness standards are important, but that does not mean that the aesthetics of the uniform do not matter. As such, when soldiers are seen in public, they should be in their dress uniforms, not in shapeless, lumpy fatigues. The Casual Friday culture – or Flip-Flop Fridays as they are apparently known in the CAF – may be appropriate for our informal Yankee friends, but Canadian soldiers should be held to a higher standard of spit and polish when in the public eye.

It might be worth thinking about redesigning dress uniforms, bringing in Versace, Armani, Barbour, or some similarly high profile fashion designer. The current look is essentially a cheap business suit in dark green, making soldiers look like drab bureaucrats. To the contrary, dress uniforms should catch the eye, they should look glorious, sharp, sexy, and sleek. These new dress uniforms might consciously call back to the Canadian military’s 19th century British roots: rather than light green shirts and dark green jackets and trousers, they could be crimson, black, and shining brass. When soldiers move around in public they should stand out and catch the eye: young men should see them and think, damn, I want to be one of those guys.

Feminization of the Military

Canadian military recruiting poster, as brought to you by Marvel Studios

The subject of women in the military deserves an extended digression, because the participation of women in the uniformed services has become something of a sacrosanct subject, as you can see from this blank-faced Canadian general waxing bureaucratic about how ‘women in peace and security’ is a strategic defence priority because the Russians don’t respect women or something. The poor guy looks like he’s in a hostage situation. Blink twice if you need help, man.

The actual truth is that women have no place in the military aside, maybe, from supporting roles. This absolutely incredible thread provides an American perspective on the realities of women in uniform, and it’s all exactly what you’d expect based on simple common sense: not only physical underperformance, but also shirking of duties, undermining of military discipline, and overall destruction of morale. The anecdotes and observations in that thread match my own experiences. I observed that female soldiers fell into one of four categories: tomboys who really were one of the boys; butch lesbians who hate the boys; regimental mattresses who really like the boys; and feminist girlbosses who are there to prove something to the boys. Of the four, only the tomboys actually make halfway decent soldiers, and they are by far the rarest type. The rest just get in the way and cause problems.

An army is, at its most basic level, a large group of heavily armed teenage boys whose hormonally driven propensity for organized mayhem is only barely kept in check and thereby channelled towards politically useful ends by the steady application of extreme discipline and the deliberate cultivation of a strong sense of fraternal esprit de corps. The social dynamics that turn a mob of teenage boys into an army are extremely sensitive to disruption because they are highly specific to the psychological makeup of hormonal teenage boys. These social dynamics are by their very nature impossible for women to directly observe, let alone participate in, because introducing even a single female into an all-male group immediately changes the social dynamics, as when a seed crystal dropped into a supersaturated solution precipitates its abrupt crystallization. With a female in their midst, that band of hormonal and therefore horny young men will immediately start competing with one another for the attention of that female: minds are distracted from the mission by the intoxicating pheremonal aroma, brothers in arms are now sexual competitors, jealousies are aroused, and discipline problems result.

Of course, sexual fraternization is against military regulations, but with the sexes in close proximity the only practical way to keep fraternization to manageable levels is to harshly punish both offenders (but especially the men) for even the most innocent of improprieties. So now your men aren’t just distracted and horny, they’re annoyed at the same time because you’re punishing them for reacting at all to the temptation you’re waving in front of their noses. You can say ‘they should just control themselves’ all you want, but that will not change anything, because the human animal is what it is. As Patton is reputed to have said, “If they won’t fuck, they won’t fight”. Of course, women in uniform are not above using these protections to cry rape or sexual assault when caught in flagrante delicto, throwing their boyfriends under the bus of military justice to save their own careers. Punishment for sexual fraternization tends to only move in one direction, and indeed, this has been used for political purges of the officer corps both in the US (e.g. the Tailhook scandal) and in Canada (where we’ve now had over a decade or perennial sex scandals which forced an unprecedented 13 senior military officers to resign in 2021, and which nearly resulted in the 150-year-old Royal Military College being shut down, which it avoided only by promising to reach a 1/3 female enrollment quota by 2035, exceeding the overall female enlistment goal by 10%).

Barracks bunnies aside, female soldiers undermine discipline still further due to the instinctive propensity of men to be more protective of and solicitous towards females: a male private breaking down in tears will earn nothing but scorn from his sergeant and mockery if not beatings from his comrades, but a female private having an emotional meltdown will cause that same sergeant to immediately lower his voice and ask what he can do to help, pumpkin. The inevitable result of this is a double-standard which women cannot help but take advantage of and men cannot help but resent. The only way to prevent such a double standard is to treat everyone the same, which in practice means and can only mean to treat the men like women, because men can withstand much higher loads of emotional stress. That is not mere misogyny: experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first large-scale conflict in which female combat soldiers saw deployment, demonstrated that female soldiers incur PTSD much more easily than males. This makes it much more difficult to properly train the male soldiers, since basic training is predicated upon using extreme emotional stress to break down the psyches of recruits in order to put them back together as military men. Women shatter under much lighter loads than men, so if stress levels are reduced to the degree that women can take them, the necessary amount of emotional stress can’t be applied to the men. This also results in the frat house atmosphere of the barracks softening into the cloistered funk of the convent, in which one must always watch what one says, avoid insensitive jokes, make sure everyone feels included, and consider everyone’s feelings. This is absolutely poisonous to the morale of the male soldiers.

The presence of women in the armed forces inhibits the male bonds that hold every military together, and introduces discipline problems, double standards, and reduced standards that can only be ameliorated with policies that corrode morale and military culture. In exchange for this the military gets soldiers who are far less physically capable, far less aggressive, and far more emotionally fragile. It’s a bad deal for the military. It is all downside and no upside. The social experiment has been run, it has yielded exactly the terrible results that anyone could have predicted, and that experiment should therefore be terminated, never to be repeated again. If we absolutely have to have women in uniform, they should be restricted to very specific trades – such as nursing or clerical work – and kept in sex-segregated units.

Instead, the Canadian military is doubling down on recruiting women, with a target of a 25% female military by 2026. Currently the CAF is 16.6% female overall. Given that women are much less interested in military service in the first place, increasing the female fraction by almost 10% in one year probably won’t happen even with a whole lot of DEI. It’s also notable that females are concentrated among officers: 19.9% of officers are female, but only 15.5% of enlisted soldiers. Naturally, women want to the ones in air conditioned offices telling people what to do, not the ones digging slit trenches. As always, ‘equality’ means ‘giving girls the high status jobs’.

One can’t help but wonder how this impacts recruiting and retention overall. From the perspective of ordinary soldiers, the feminization of the officer class simply turns the military into another HR-dominated corporate environment. We also know that the CAF quietly discriminates against white men in recruitment by closing certain trades to them until female quotas are met. Women are overwhelmingly disinterested in the soldier’s life, and it does not matter how much Gloria Steinem you make people read or how many Strong Independent Women totally kick ass in Marvel movies, that is not ever going to change. It is long past time for society to make peace with human nature, and allow its institutions to work with instead of against it. Let the military be the fraternal warrior band that every military has ever been and will always be, let its soldiers focus on training for war, and you’ll get a lot more young men interested in joining.

Recruiting Foreigners

At the end of 2022 the CAF began trying to recruit non-citizens in an effort to fill the enlistment gap. Recruitment was opened to permanent residents (which is to say, in general, to Indians). Taking a page from Robert Heinlein in the worst possible way, the pot is sweetened with the promise that service guarantees (expedited) citizenship. Of course, this policy is also explicitly intended to make the military more diverse.

Non-citizen recruitment got off to a slow start, with only eight permanent residents recruited in the first year of the program. This seems to have been largely due to the onerous security screening process. In 2024-2025, however, the number of permanent residents successfully inducted into the CAF ballooned by 100x to over 800 recruits, over 10% of the year’s total.

This has had the desired effect on the military’s diversity metrics, with over a quarter of new recruits in 2024-2025 being from a non-First Nations visible minority.

This rapid increase in the number of foreigners being enlisted within the Canadian military seems to be, at least in part, due to reforms introduced by the Iraqi Evaci⁵, which she proudly announced at a press conference in February. One of these reforms was to outsource much of the security screening of PRs to Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, under the theory that IRCC has already looked into the backgrounds of the people it gave permanent residencies to, so why not just take their word for it. Given the IRCC’s mission profile of brownmaxxing Canada as fast as intercontinental passenger jets can fly, the IRCC can be relied upon to do a thorough job of vetting, as anyone can see from the extremely high quality of elite human capital that Canada has blessed itself with in recent years.

It should go without saying that filling the military with non-white non-citizens is actually quite a terrible idea. Such soldiers are for all intents and purposes mercenaries with no organic loyalty to the Canadian people. They are very likely to have divided loyalties, and to exhibit ethnic in-group preferences which could become a problem if they establish themselves in significant numbers, as experience with Indians has already repeatedly demonstrated in the private sector. Security is an obvious concern, and pretending that CSIS can catch all, most, or even any operatives of, say, Chinese state intelligence is dangerously naive. Their grasp of either English or French is likely to be far from perfect, leading to potential communications breakdowns which could have meaningful consequences on the battlefield. Cultural differences interfere with an easy sense of comity between foreign and native troops, introducing friction into military units that reduces discipline, unit cohesion, and operational efficiency even further than it already has been.

Historically, armies composed of foreign mercenaries are fragile and unreliable. From the point of view of tyrants, however, they have one great advantage: with no sense of connection to the people the tyrants rule over, they have no compunctions about oppressing them.

It is by no means certain that recruiting foreigners in large numbers will actually increase recruitment on net. When a given organization fills up with a certain kind of person, it becomes coded as an occupation or environment belonging to that type of person, meaning that other types avoid it. Female-coded workplaces tend to reach tipping points in which any remaining men look for the exits, for example. A similar phenomenon happens with racial diversity: the local fast food joint that used to employ teenagers drives all the teenagers away as it fills up swarthy middle-aged men with Star Wars names, because teenage girls don’t want to get creeped on by surly foreigners raised in actual rape cultures. If the Canadian military becomes known as an organization primarily staffed by third world coolies, actual Canadians will avoid it – it will be coded as a low-status occupation for the imports.

Every society has a traditional warrior class. In Canada, that means young white men from rural areas and small towns who were raised in families with long traditions of military service. Quite aside from issues of competence and loyalty, recruitment drives that sideline the traditional warrior class in favour of outreach to other groups usually accomplish nothing more than the alienation of the traditional warrior class: for every recruit from a non-traditional group that’s gained, at least one recruit from the traditional group is lost. But instead, in an effort to attract more permanent residents, Canada is putting out commemorative stamps celebrating the zero point zero zero one five percent of Canada’s World War One military that was comprised of Sikhs (there were a whole ten of them).

Pay and Conditions

No one joins the military to get rich, but you don’t want your private soldiers visiting the food bank.

By far the single largest factor that makes recruitment and retention an uphill struggle is that, for many decades now, Canadian soldiers have been underpaid, overworked, and housed in absolutely deplorable conditions. The under-strength military struggles to meet the responsibilities that Ottawa loads onto its narrow shoulders, resulting in soldiers being deployed too regularly, being relocated around the country too often and with too little notice, and working longer hours than they should with outdated and broken equipment. Naturally, this leads to burnout. It also disrupts family formation, and puts dual-income households with one civilian spouse in a difficult position, as new employment can be challenging to find at short notice, particularly when your husband is posted to a remote area.

The awful state of military housing has been proverbial in the CAF for decades. Facilities are cheaply built, old, and in poor repair: stories about electrical problems, toilets that won’t flush, unsafe drinking water, terrible insulation, and so on are quite common. Soldiers move off base into civilian housing as soon as they can, but of course, given the Canadian real estate bubble and the low pay, this presents issues of its own.

You also hear a lot of stories about soldiers having to buy their own kit out of pocket, because the kit provided by the CAF is simply not fit for purpose. Again, this has been happening for a long time. It’s one thing when soldiers are purchasing camelpaks because they’re better than canteens, or bringing their own air mattresses; it’s quite another when they’re buying their own helmets.

All of that impacts morale. Burnt out, demoralized soldiers leave, and they tell their friends and family not to join.

The remote locations of the CAF’s bases are another factor impacting retention. The majority of Canadian Forces Bases are far from population centres, which is great for training since there are few civilians to be annoyed by the thunder of artillery practice, but it’s also isolating for the soldiers, and accentuates difficulties in finding off-base housing and locating employment for civilian spouses. I’d hazard that keeping the bulk of the CAF in the ass end of nowhere also negatively impacts recruitment because it keeps the military out of the public eye. Out of sight, out of mind, as they say.

Credit where it’s due, the Carney government has given soldiers a generous pay increase: 20% for privates, 13% for all ranks from corporal to lieutenant-colonel, and 8% for colonels and above. The base pay of a private soldier is now CAD50,000 per year, which still isn’t great, but then that is for a private, after all. A captain gets over CAD100,000.

Carney’s commitment to increase defence spending is also a good start. Yelling ‘bang, you’re dead’ because your unit exceeded its training ammo budget is the kind of thing that leaves service members wondering just what the hell they’re doing with their lives, especially when they return from their hard day simulating ammunition with their vocal cords to a dilapidated barracks with leaky roofs and busted wiring.

Whether any of this money will actually manifest in a meaningful material improvement is another question entirely. The sclerotic, over-regulated, micromanaged Canadian economy excels in soaking up great wads of public cash into bureaucratic processes that yield little practical effect, and military procurement is absolutely no exception. The Carney government’s budget is extremely vague on the details about exactly how the money will be spent. One suspects a great deal of it will be diverted towards initiatives aimed at using AI to streamline a DEI-enabled security screening and recruitment platform, procurement focused on purchases of lightly armoured emission-free electric vehicles, and so on. Regardless, there’s no question that Canada should be spending a lot more money on its military, and that improving the pay and living conditions of the troops, and equipping them with functional munitions, is an absolutely necessary precondition both to recruitment of new soldiers and retention of existing personnel. The government is at least on the right track here.

Building new military facilities in close proximity to population centres could have benefits for both recruitment and retention. Troops garrisoned close to civilian populations have more access to civilized amenities: military service is thereby prevented from being a one-way ticket to isolation in the ass-end of nowhere. Proximity to population centres makes it easier for military wives and girlfriends to find employment following relocation. Troops garrisoned close to civilians are also more regularly seen by civilians, which helps to keep the military front and centre as a potential career path.

Taking Care of Veterans

Prospective soldiers aren’t only looking for distinction, glory, and adventure: they want to know that they’ll have a half-way decent life after their term of service is over, as, one way or the other, it eventually will be.

There is a basic moral duty to look after veterans when they retire, and this has been shamefully abused. Military service is dangerous and difficult. It can take a horrendous toll on the body and mind. Too many vets are left to fall by the wayside, descending into ego-annihilation of substance abuse to escape from the frustrations of fighting with Veterans Affairs Canada for the medical care they need to deal with the broken backs or traumatic brain injuries. The indignity is deepened when they see the state’s largesse dispensed with generous abandon upon asylum seekers (often nationals of the very countries they fought in) who have given nothing to the country and have been present on Canadian soil for all of five minutes. We hear stories of vets being recommended to consider Medical Assistance in Dying when all they want is a wheelchair ramp, or getting denied coverage for traumatic brain injuries they incurred as door-kickers. Sadly, casting military veterans aside like rotten fruit once they’ve been squeezed dry of their last drops of usefulness is an old and shameful tradition in the Anglosphere. Such stories act as a deterrent to service. It’s bad enough to risk death or injury for your country; being abandoned to your fate is far too much.

Potential recruits need to know that they’ll receive valuable training and education, both in the form of providing on-the-job technical skills that can be easily applied to civilian life, and in the form of directly subsidized education at civilian colleges and universities. The Royal Military College provides this for a relatively small cadre of officers, who receive a four-year university degree in exchange for four years of service. Other officer training universities could be established; alternatively, reserve officer training programs could be built within existing universities, along the American ROTC model.

Official preferment in employment would go a long way to sweetening the pot. Essentially this would amount to providing DEI for veterans. Bump veterans to the head of the line for good jobs, mandate that a certain (high) fraction of jobs be allocated to veterans, and young men will scramble to become veterans. Federal government employees are already required to be bilingual: why not require military service as a precondition for employment in the civil service? To paraphrase Heinlein, “Service guarantees employment!”

Effective Propaganda

An effective recruiting drive requires a propaganda campaign. So far Canada has stubbornly refused to mythologize its military prowess, indeed if anything the Canadian state has cultivated a national antimyth that keeps Canadians in deliberate ignorance about their own history, that is, when it isn’t funding biopics of Sikh terrorists assassinating Canadian immigration officers. This is easily changed. An investment of a few hundred million dollars – a small fraction of the CBC’s CAD1.4 billion budget – would be sufficient to produce a series of high-production value movies and TV shows about historical heroes such as Wolfe and Montcalm in the Seven Years’ War, Major-General Sir Isaac Brock in the War of 1812, the Great War air ace Billy Bishop, the Ojibwe commando Tommy Prince, or Leo Major, who was decorated twice, once in World War II and once in Korea.

For more modern subject-matter, Canada’s Joint Task Force 2 provides ample fodder. Man for man the JTF2 are every bit as lethal as the Green Berets or the Navy SEALs, but whereas Hollywood has turned American special forces operators into bywords for the elite military, the JTF2 languishes in relative obscurity, despite having achieved incredible feats such as the first sniper kill over 3 km. A TV series could follow a JTF2 team during the Great War on Terror, with the plot arc moving between their secretive missions abroad, and a home life intertwined with the political machinations of the Canadian elite and the fraying social fabric. The intent of such a show would not only be to mythologize Canada’s special forces, but also to provide a sober, unflinching critique of the ancien regime’s failures of will and lack of national loyalty. This would help to communicate to potential recruits that the bad old days are over, and that the adults are back in charge.

A reality TV show following a platoon of recruits through basic training could also be a highly effective – and relatively inexpensive – recruiting tool. The idea would be to present a compelling before-and-after narrative, starting with recruits who are soft, fat, undisciplined, and lacking in confidence, and ending with a body of men who are fit, trim, disciplined, and sure of themselves. In between these points in their development the show would document, in unflinching detail and in all its brutality, the rigours of training and the emotional strain placed on the recruits. Some might think that such a show would dissuade recruits, but the opposite is the case: Full Metal Jacket is something of a timeless classic in the military, entirely because of its depiction of boot camp. Young men want to be tested, challenged, pushed to their limits and beyond.

No discussion of recruitment propaganda is complete without a discussion of social media. The CAF’s current social media strategy seems to be to place its official accounts in the hands of woke females, and while I’m sure this is very beneficial for their self-esteem, its main practical result is to elicit mockery, when it isn’t simply ignored. Not only does this social media strategy completely fail to connect with what should be the target audience, it also reeks of inauthenticity, which is absolute death on the Internet. Instead, these social media accounts should be placed into the hands of young male zoomers weened on the Khazar milkers of frog memes, and they should be given a free hand to be as irreverent and ironic as they desire. Serving soldiers should also be encouraged to maintain their own social media presence if they so desire, with the understanding that so long as they don’t leak operational secrets or break the law in some fashion they are at liberty to post what they want. The name of the game in the online attention economy is virality, and virality is not achieved with focus-grouped, committee-driven message discipline, but with spontaneity and dark humour. TikTok videos showing young men playing with high-tech weapons and other toys of war in the forest as they crack edgy jokes could go a long way. The goal is to make military training look like the kind of fun that young men want to have.

Conclusion

In the short term, holding the military to extremely high standards of fitness and exacting standards of dress will almost certainly have the opposite of the desired effect: rather than increasing the size of the military, it will shrink it. This is desirable, an intended boiling-off effect. The military currently has a very great quantity of dead weight, women and men who have no business being in uniform, and whose very presence actively dissuades high quality men from joining in the first place. There is still, I am told – and I very much want to believe that this is true – a hard core of soldiers who, because they love the military life more than they despise Ottawa’s insane politics, have resisted the Great Awokening, enduring its humiliations, keeping their heads down, and doing their best to maintain some semblance of military professionalism as they wait for the long fever to break. Such men would be the rock on which the church of the new Canadian army is built.

As things currently stand, these reforms are every bit the pipe dream that the Carney government’s goal of a massive expansion in recruitment is. Aggressive young men are not going to join a military led by fat, weepy grandmas, organized around the defence of Our Democratic Values of giving brown people our stolen land. The Liberal Occupation Government isn’t going to reverse its commitment to gay race communism. You can have liberalism, or you can have an army, but you can’t have both. An army needs young men, and young Canadian men aren’t going to fight for traitors who despise them.

If you read all of that, congratulations. It was a lot. I sincerely hope that it wasn’t too much of a slog. At this point I’m thoroughly sick of the subject, and can’t wait to get back to writing about something more interesting.

As always, I would like to thank my supporters, whose incredible patience as they wait for me to actually publish something is nothing short of saint-like.

1. As an aside, the recently released first episode of his new series The Germans’ War, concerning the German experience of the Great War which laid the foundations for WWII, is absolutely gripping.

2. Rumour Intelligence, widely held to be the best form of intelligence available within the military.

3. The man who, as prime minister, replaced the red ensign’s ethnic heraldry with the maple leaf’s corporate logo.

4. Apparently, however, there were discussions between senior police officials concerning the idea of disguising soldiers as police officers.

5. As an amusing aside, during the question period, one of the journalists asked Carignan a pointed question about whether wokeness was dissuading Canadians from joining, which it obviously is; she replied archly that she didn’t know what ‘woke’ was, thereby confirming that she is, in fact, woke.