Canada’s Military Recruitment Mirage

Canada’s military recruitment is up. That much is true. But, as often is the case, the Devil is in the details.

In the last fiscal year, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) “enrolled 7,310 Regular Force members, surpassing its recruiting target of 6,957 new members and marking the highest number of enrolments in more than 30 years” according to the Department of National Defence (DND).

Why the big jump? Up until now, many Canadians have the made the logical inference that the surge in military recruitment is being buoyed by the rising tide of Canadian nationalism amid the renewed American imperialism of the Trump administration. However, the DND notice quoted above goes on to explain that the latest recruitment total includes “1,400 permanent residents”.

Permanent residents have attained residency in the country, but are not Canadian – hence why they cannot vote. In December 2022, the Trudeau government allowed this class of non-Canadians to join the military.

This was by no means an attempt to create a Canadian version of the French Foreign Legion, the elite branch of the French Army founded in 1831 that accepts very limited numbers of worthy foreign nationals, who are then offered a path to French citizenship. Instead, the Trudeau government simply opened the doors of Canadian military recruitment to foreigners. This move was justified in the characteristically dreamy language of the Trudeau era: “Permanent residents represent an important, skilled, and diverse workforce in Canada”. Whatever that means.

Fast forward to this past week, when media outlet Juno News published a scoop revealing the Canadian government’s permanent resident military recruit experiment is having disastrous results. The whole article is well worth a read, but here are the first few paragraphs:

“A confidential Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School report has revealed a complete breakdown in basic officer training following a surge in permanent resident enrolment.

One French-language platoon, which had over 80 per cent non-citizens, was reportedly wracked by an inability to communicate fluently, a lack of respect towards female CAF members and infighting between Cameroonian and Côte d’Ivoire candidates.

The Quebec platoon saw fewer than one in two recruits graduate, while allegations of racial discrimination were made in multiple directions, from candidates against staff and between candidates of opposing ethnic blocs themselves. Additionally, command saw ‘challenges’ in training permanent residents as they lacked ‘respect towards women’ peers and superiors.”

CBC picked up the story, quoting several sections of the report, including the following: “These initial platoons were also made up of candidates with as little as three months residency in Canada, leading to a significant culture shock as candidates had not yet acclimatized to Canadian society, let alone Canadian military culture”.

We all want our military to do well. We want recruitment to soar. Dramatic shifts in the global order have multiplied security threats, while an increasingly unreliable United States cannot necessarily be counted on to come to our aid in the event of some kind of aggression (and the USA may even be the source of that aggression, an unlikely but terrifying scenario that we should be prepared for).

That said, recruitment gains must be grounded in reality, not a mirage. The current increase in military recruitment is largely the result of a Trudeau policy that allowed large numbers of foreign nationals to become military recruits – and to the surprise of few, this poorly thought out decision is creating chaos and disorder. The leaked report indicates that not only do these foreign recruits appear to have a low graduation rate, but their introduction into our military is fuelling cultural conflicts and a lack of respect for women.

The answer is obvious. The Carney government should scrap the Trudeau policy of allowing permanent residents to become military recruits, just as it has so ruthlessly eliminated other misguided policies from the Lost Decade when our federal government went on a kind of collective mental vacation from 2015-2025.