Who Will Stand On Guard For Canada In The Years To Come?

Pallbearers carry the casket of fallen soldier, Sapper Steven Marshall during the Repatriation ceremony held on Thursday 03 November 2009, at CFB Trenton Ontario. Photo created by Cpl Igor R. Korpan

Every time around this year you get the usual obligatory media stories honouring our soldiers and our veterans. This can only be a good thing, except for the fact that it usually takes the 11th of November to remind everybody about the sacrifices that were made in the past, and the ones that continue to be made by our current military serving throughout the world. The National Post ran a good article yesterday by Graeme Hamilton that stands out from the rest, in that it reminds us of the challenges facing Canada’s standing army in the years to come. In this respect, it is an article that not only looks back upon our veterans, but forward to the next generation of veterans.

Mr.Hamilton reminds us again of the demographic shift in Canada that will eventually need to rely upon our ethnic minorities in order to sustain our military. The subject of our mainly “white” Army has been broached a few times in the media, delicately, describing minorities as “under-represented” in this article from 2008. But they aren’t just under-represented; they are fairly absent from duty.

In the more than 50 years since the Korean war, Canada has become a mainly urban country of large multicultural demography. But while the face of Canada has changed, the faces of its war dead, as Mr.Hamilton observes, largely have not:

The names, photos and hometowns of those who have died in Afghanistan provide a portrait of the Canadian solider of the 21st century, and in some ways he is not all that different from his 20th-century predecessor. “Who fights for Canada? Young white men, that’s who fights,” Douglas Bland, chairman of Queen’s University’s defence studies program, puts it bluntly. There are obviously exceptions to his generalization: three women are among the Canadian dead, as are six members of visible minority groups. But the great majority of casualties are white men between the ages of 20 and 39. They are more likely to have grown up in small towns than in major cities. And relative to its population, Atlantic Canada has suffered the heaviest losses.

[...]

In the post-Charter of Rights era, the army has increased efforts to recruit visible minorities, aboriginals and women. But a 2006 report by Canada’s auditor-general found that recruitment among the three groups had fallen well below National Defence targets. According to the latest numbers from the army, 17% of Canadian Forces personnel are women. Visible minorities make up 3.4% of the Forces, compared with 16% of the overall population, and aboriginals are 2.6%, compared with 3.8% of the population. One area where the Forces are becoming more representative of the general population is age, a fact reflected in the Afghanistan casualties.

What does not bode well for Canada’s military is that the demographic still doing all the heavy lifting, fit, young, rural, white males, are shrinking in numbers with each passing year. And while socioeconomic status may play a large part in selecting a career in the military, research done in Canadian communities of Chinese and South Asian immigrants show that young Canadians of these communities do not consider military service because their parents and the community do not value it as a good career choice. That will have to change, and soon, if Canada hopes to sustain a fighting force capable of taking on other projects as large as Afghanistan [and even that mission is small in comparison to some of our other war efforts].

As noted in the article, Canadians seem to think military intervention is important in some cases:

“Mr. Leuprecht notes that the aversion to military service is not confined to recent immigrants; he sees it among university students who are all for a military intervention in Darfur, as long as they’re not called upon to serve.”

It’s the Homer Simpson solution to containing the murderous regimes and toppling the dictators of the world: “Can’t someone else do it?”