My Case for Conscription in Canada

I’ll be blunt: after 80 long years, we need to bring back conscription — and fast. But I’m not in love with the idea.

With his tariff decree on April 2, Donald Trump effectively ended the U.S.-dominated “rules-based” world order that we have all lived under since 1945. Whatever its many drawbacks, it kept the major powers from fighting wars with one another. Now we are back in the anarchy of the late 19th century, when “advanced” countries carved empires out of those less advanced.

Trump wants the Panama Canal back in U.S. hands. He continues to insist that owning Greenland is essential to U.S. security, and he’s repeatedly talked about making Canada the 51st state. Our old protector has become a threat, and the world’s longest undefended border looks very vulnerable.

We are suddenly in the predicament of the Nordic and Baltic states, living next door to a predatory power. Perhaps we could draw some lessons from them.

Consider Finland. It’s a small country of 5.6 million people — about 100,000 fewer than the population of British Columbia. But it has a standing army of 24,000 and in wartime could put 280,000 troops in the field by drawing upon a total reserve force of 870,000.

Conscription and money

The Finns do it through conscription — and money. All men 18 and older are liable for military service, and since 1995 women have also been able to volunteer. Finland is spending 2.5 per cent of its GDP on defence this year and plans to increase that to at least three per cent by 2029. (It also intends to withdraw from the Ottawa Convention against the use of land mines to protect its border with Russia, which is probably a bad idea.)

Surprisingly, Finland has also been named the happiest country in the world for eight consecutive years. Despite the burden of military spending and training — and perhaps in part because of it — Finns feel like part of a community with a strong welfare system.

By contrast, we’re a country of 41 million, seven times Finland’s population, and we rank 18th in happiness. (The United States is 23rd.) We spend 1.3 per cent of GDP on defence. We currently have about 68,000 active personnel and 27,000 in the reserves, plus 5,000 mostly Indigenous personnel in the Canadian Rangers. All are volunteers.

So in an emergency, such as an invasion, Canada could mobilize about 100,000 troops, a little over a third of the army that Finland could raise against an attack.

But about seven million Canadians are between the ages of 18 and 30. If we conscripted men only, and allowed women to volunteer, we could put over 3.5 million fit young people into uniform — not all at once, but over a period of several years.

When the United States had the draft, draftees went almost entirely to the army. The draft itself encouraged volunteers to join the navy and air force — or to sign up for special training in the army. Something similar could influence Canadian recruitment: most recruits would be volunteers, with conscription filling out the ranks.

And not only the ranks of the Canadian Armed Forces. We also need a new national organization of civil defence workers, trained and equipped to deal with anything from wildfires to drone attacks.

Enlistment as a career move

We could make conscription less necessary by making enlistment a good career move. Sign up for the Forces or Civil Defence for four years, and when your hitch is over, go straight to post-secondary, tuition-free. Report for reserve duty in the summer and get a reasonable living allowance for the next year.

For many, the education would be in the service itself: training in the trades and engineering, followed by practical experience. After your hitch, you could get steady work building new housing — both on military bases and for civilians.

Conscripts would get the same deal but might not be able to pick their specialty. Still, careful testing could identify unexpected talents for cyberwarfare or drone design — or cooking, or teaching.

Conscription would also have remarkable social benefits by moving people around the country so they meet and work with all kinds of different Canadians (not to mention immigrants fast-tracking their citizenship). They would gain a new appreciation for their fellow Canadians and for the country itself.

Canadian soldiers could well have opportunities to go overseas. We will surely remain in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or its successor, and some of our troops would be stationed in Europe for training and to help deter Russia and its allies from attacking.

Preventing a war, not fighting one

The point of an expanded Canadian Forces would be not to fight a war, but to make such a war so unpleasantly costly that enemies would have to content themselves with low-grade hybrid warfare instead of an all-out invasion.

I’m making the case for conscription with some reservations. I’m giving it two cheers, not three. Maybe only one cheer.

First of all, no country in its right mind should spend a dime on defence. Given the climate catastrophe we face, we should be committed to reducing emissions and climate-proofing our cities, forests and farmlands. Diverting funds to the military only worsens the emissions problem and ensures the climate will worsen faster. But the clear and present danger Trump poses leaves us no choice.

Second, history does not encourage conscription. We had it in both world wars, and both times it was politically divisive.

The draft in the United States ended with the Vietnam War debacle, because too many working-class and middle-class families had lost kids in that futile conflict.

The ones who came home were often suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder before the term was even defined. I still remember the young Canadian Vietnam veteran in one of my classes in 1969: his was the first thousand-yard stare I ever saw.

And I saw it again years later, in another student who was trying to recover from a career involving tours in both Bosnia and Afghanistan. It’s bad enough when volunteers sign up with full knowledge that they may return with invisible wounds that never heal; forcing people to join and risk PTSD is simply cruel.

That’s why our conscription would offer options like civil defence or non-combat tasks, as the Finns do.

If you can’t beat ’em, outwit ’em

Another argument against conscription is that it lets the politicians off the hook. A smart government should be able to apply diplomatic pressure on allies and adversaries alike, making alternatives to war much more attractive.

A well-trained, well-equipped military would give our diplomats extra clout, but we should be able to outmanoeuvre our enemies when we can never outgun them.

The Canadian Forces already have a serious problem recruiting and retaining personnel.

In 2022, 70,000 applied but only 5,000 got through security screening and medical testing and actually enlisted. The Forces are still about 10,000 under-strength. A faster, more efficient process could get more people in uniform; if Finland can do it, so can we.

Faster recruitment in turn could make conscription less urgent. But if a crisis were to arise that required a sharp increase in military and civil defence personnel, conscription would be far easier to implement.

Back in 1942, when Germany and Japan seemed to be winning the Second World War and we needed more people in the Armed Forces, then-prime minister Mackenzie King famously said: “Not necessarily conscription, but conscription if necessary.” He had promised not to impose conscription for overseas service, and now he wanted a plebiscite that would release him from his promise.

He got the votes (mostly from English Canada), and two years later, after heavy Canadian losses in Normandy, he implemented conscription for overseas duty. That led to a political crisis and then to an outright mutiny in Terrace, B.C., in 1944. The mutineers were conscripts who feared they would be shipped overseas instead of staying in Canada for the duration of the war.

As it turned out, King sent only a couple of thousand conscripts to join units in Europe, when the war was almost at an end. He had defused a very dangerous political bomb.

But a prime minister facing a potential war with the United States might not be so lucky. If we can’t fill the ranks with volunteers before hostilities start, conscripts could indeed be necessary.