The Weakness of Canada’s Reserve Military System

Authors: Raymond Floreani and Dr.Julian Spencer-Churchill

Canada, a country of over 41 million people with 1.2 million unemployed and a US$2.4 trillion economy, only has 23,600 active military reservists, of which 16,900 are army. There are another 5,000 Arctic Rangers intended for sovereignty patrolling rather than combat. This comes out to 5% of 1% of the citizenry, a trivially small number. This compares with 63,300 members of the regular armed forces (20% of which are headquarters and administrative personnel) and another 6,700 mostly unarmed Coast Guard. Canada’s 75,000 police average using firearms about 60 times per year in total (excluding Quebec) and have the total firepower of a single rifle battalion of U.S. Marines, according to the ATC. Canada has a hollow defense. A U.S. occupation of Canada’s arctic north, or annexation as the 51st state, would be an administrative matter not involving much military strategy. Fort Drum’s U.S. 10th Mountain Division is a two-hour drive from Ottawa, the capital.

It takes two years of intensive training to transform civilians into capable combat soldiers, the time of which is dramatically cut down with a large reserve force. The idea that the future of war will be fought by drones and laser-guided bombs rather than men with guns on the ground is refuted by the U.S. military’s failure in its remote war over the Straits of Hormuz. Ben Connable confirms in his exhaustive database that since 2003 there has never been a case of an engagement won without the lowly foot soldier (tracked robots in Ukraine have been used as sentries and logistics), since only they can hold ground against infiltration. What an untrained army looks like is demonstrated by the many tragedies befalling the U.S. Army in the first six months of 1950 during the Korean War. With enough time to train before the D-Day landings during the Second World War, 95 percent of Canadian battalion commanders, typically lieutenant colonels, were from the reserve.

The Canadian reserves cost US$2.7bn annually, compared with the annual overhead cost of an average of US$700 million per annum (adjusted for inflation) for the UK’s entire nuclear arsenal between 1981 and 2000 (the British built 1,200 nuclear warheads during the Cold War). That is $93,000 per reservist, or a $50 cost per Canadian. Operating Britain’s nuclear deterrent cost $12 per citizen, a bargain by comparison. An estimated 500,000 Canadians get bitten by dogs every year, of which 500 are Canada Post employees.

There are no easy solutions to the problem of recruiting reservists. One of the authors served in the army reserve as a sapper and a regimental operations officer from during the Cold War to after the events of 9/11 and was periodically assigned to the thankless task of attracting and enrolling new recruits (training and mentoring them was more enjoyable). Joining took months to half-a-year because of a Byzantine bureaucracy filled with unfathomable incompetents, although it was easier during the Cold War. Releasing took two weeks’ leave of notice (much like any civilian job)—the Canadian reserve has no contract, unlike virtually any other NATO reserve force, and has generous dental and educational allowances and a pension. Recessions briefly tripled enrollment, and only half of recruits stick out the initial training. Turnover is very high, with about 50 percent of a given year’s members releasing annually, although there is an accumulation of a great number of wise long-service members. The accumulated wisdom shared weekly in the mess from combat veterans who had fought the Afrika Korps, Chinese volunteers in Korea, in the Malayan Emergency, anti-terrorism, and Vietnam veterans among our American friends who would come up from Fort Drum to train with us was entrancing.

As an organization characterized more by courage than discipline, especially in Canada’s brutal weather, it is an organization that best represents the class, ethnic, linguistic, and religious cross section of Canadian society. For example, we welcomed learning how to accommodate Zoroastrians with regard to the smoke of BBQs. The reserve had even greater diversity than a university setting and was more accepting of homosexuality, for example. There were always a disproportionate number of immigrants, especially those who were disempowered in their countries of origin. We once had enough Russian speakers to run a full radio net. The pay is comparably far superior today than it was in the 1980s, but the irregular and intermittent income was and is not a major factor for those who remained. My ultimate insight is that reservists have a multitude of motives, but the long-term appeal of the job only attracts a very particular personality. Those who want adventure go hiking in the Rockies, and those that want action join the regular armed forces and hope for war, but neither remains long in the reserve. I make this frustratingly ambiguous conclusion despite having run numerous linear regressions and accumulated exit interviews. 

Our conclusion is that one pathway to increasing reserve component enrollment is to expand the trade function of reservists, taking note of the fact that municipal search and rescue volunteers are almost always oversubscribed. Also, provincial and federal governments frequently make expensive use of scarce regular soldiers in non-military emergencies. As this year’s situation with wildfires is again painfully showing Canadians (and Americans and Europeans), it is well past time that the federal government and the provinces create a joint force of specially trained reservists that can supplement local authorities in domestic affairs at provincial disposal and also form a pool of secondary reservists for the armed forces in conflict. American state governors, for example, have their state national guards as tools at their discretion to call up in assisting local authorities.

In our expansive proposal for the development of the Canadian Armed Forces, we outlined a plan for the creation of such a militia of 40,000 personnel, a specialized part of which would be controlled by the premiers and legislatures unless mobilized by the federal government for out-of-province-of-origin emergencies. Like the U.S. National Guard, their normal service commitment would entail initial BMQ/GMT training and then one contracted weekend a month and two months a year of statutorily protected training and exercise time.

Climate change has the Canadian provinces confronted with worsening wildfires, flooding, and other events that tax the federal government for assistance in aid to the civil power. If the province is overwhelmed beyond its specialized emergency responders, it can escalate to trained reservists, and if still deluged, then the federal government can mobilize additional out-of-province reservists. Each province would only be responsible for maintaining the specialized equipment for non-military missions and for the upkeep and regular maintenance of the resources supplied to their force while under their jurisdiction, while equipment upgrades and replacements would be a federal government responsibility. The federal government would contribute a minimum of $20,000 per militia soldier annually towards training, wages, and benefits to encourage the provinces to sign on. The provinces would be responsible for funding the operational costs, which are manageable given the part-time personnel. Equipped primarily with military cargo and troop trucks, dump trucks, cranes, loaders, graders, excavators, shovels, and backhoes, it is a force structure built on assisting their fellow citizens at home. The plan also calls for the creation of a dedicated firefighting squadron of 12 CL-515 water bombers to be purchased by the federal government, flown by RCAF pilots out of Winnipeg, and available to any province to call upon when needed. 

We propose they be attached to the 22 light infantry regiments of troops spread across the country, stationed within these historical regimental identities. They would train as soldiers but would also receive specialized skills required for non-conflict home protection, including forest firefighting, law enforcement, search and rescue, construction for flood, earthquake, and storm contingencies, and related skills necessary to assist local authorities when required in a natural disaster emergency. Just over half of the 40,000 proposed force (21,604) would constitute the 22 organic light infantry battalions spread out over the provinces. This is the primary pool of reservists available to reinforce the Canadian Army. The rest of the total (18,396) would constitute these specialized units. 

We envision the regional distribution of the militia to include Ontario with 10,000 militia and 6 regiments of infantry; Quebec with 8,000 and 4 regiments; Alberta with 5,500 militia and regiments; BC with 5,000 and 3 regiments; Manitoba with 3,000 and 2 regiments; Saskatchewan with 2,500 militia and 1 regiment; both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, each with 2,000 militia and 1 regiment of infantry; Newfoundland with 1,500 and 1 regiment; and PEI with 500 militia. We expect that 10 percent of the force (4,000) will be full-time postings, split evenly between regular military supervisors and Class B and C contractees. 

The war in Ukraine demonstrates that modern military personnel require a degree of specialized training far beyond that required during the Second World. Fighting forest fires is a serious detraction from their training cycles, especially among the regular armed forces. While it is so far politically sustainable for Russia to provide a month’s training and dispatch soldiers into urban combat, resulting in an alleged lifespan of 20-30 minutes, human capital, especially in Canada, is by far the greatest cost and has the greatest value in most enterprises. Ontario and British Columbia would be in much better shape to face this season’s wildfires if such an occasional non-permanent but well-trained force, already existed.