The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) and Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Gen. Jennie Carignan made headlines after it was reported that a new defence department directive is looking at how to mobilize Canada’s public servants as soldiers. The directive, signed by the CDS back in May of this year, outlines how public servants at the provincial and federal level could potentially volunteer for the Supplementary Reserves (Supp Res) to help swell its ranks from the current level of 4,300 to 300,000.According to the directive, these volunteers would receive a week’s long training session on weapons handling, vehicle and drone operation as well as other “basic skills” on an ongoing annual basis.My personal reaction as a retired member of the CAF and former federal public service employee was to literally, laugh out loud. Not a guffaw or a chuckle mind you, but a full-throated belly laugh that had me in tears with my sides aching after reading it.The idea is so outlandish that if I hadn’t seen that it was written by veteran defence reporter David Pugliese and published in the Ottawa Citizen I would have assumed it to be the satirical work of The Beaverton, or The Onion.But it’s not satire, and lost amid the jokes about how the government will convince public servants to go to a rifle range when they couldn’t get them back to their own offices, is a much more troubling issue; why is our Supp Res manning level at a meagre 4,300?If you do the math, that’s 0.01% of the Canadian population. It’s less than the total population of Kindersley, Saskatchewan and a hundred other towns across the country.What’s really bad is when you consider it’s that low despite every member releasing from the CAF is offered the opportunity to join the Supp Res, and that over the past ten years an average of 8,200 members release from the CAF annually.While some of these individuals were undoubtedly released for medical reasons and ineligible to enroll in the Supp Res, the majority of the remainder chose not to check the box which indicates their willingness to join it.According to Military Personnel Instruction 02/15 the period of service for the Supp Res is “normally five years or until CRA, whichever comes first.” That means given its current approximate strength, the number of personnel leaving the CAF who join the Supp Res is somewhere less than 1000 per year. Oof.How exactly does the CAF think that it will be able to grow the Supp Res to 300,000 or the Reserve Force to 100,000 personnel in the event of a major war or natural disaster, when they can’t even convince their own members to agree to a five-year commitment with next to no obligations and zero training commitments?If the CAF and the CDS are serious about their plans, then they need to make the Supp Res more alluring to retiring and releasing members of the CAF. That’s where you start, not with the fevered dreams of some Ottawa bureaucrat or staff officer touched in the head by the ‘good idea fairy’.Expending resources to create and offer weeklong training opportunities of dubious strategic value to public servants is a fool’s errand. Especially when the CAF doesn’t even have the capacity to offer anything like that to members who are already part of the Supp Res to maintain or develop the skills they acquired throughout their service.All that said, I do have to genuinely commend the CDS and CAF for a bold, albeit laughable idea. Because it’s real value isn’t in the cockamamie plan they’ve hatched, but that it serves as a starting point for the serious conversation this country needs to have about mobilization, national defence, sovereignty, and who our allies are, and who are not.And sometimes humour is the best way to break the ice before diving into that kind of discussion. In that regard, thank you General Carignan, mission accomplished.
