Nobody asked us. On May 30, 2025, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen. Jennie Carignan, and deputy minister Stefanie Beck signed a document that changes what Ottawa can ask of us. It launched a plan to expand the Reserve Force and build a new supplementary civilian force — roughly 85,000 more regular troops, 100,000 more reservists, and about 300,000 civilians. CBC obtained the documents. That is close to half a million Canadians, in a plan signed in the spring and reported months later.
Now look at what Ottawa can actually recruit. In FY2025/26 the Canadian Armed Forces enrolled 7,310 people against a target of 6,957. DND calls it the highest enrolment in more than three decades, and it is. The Globe and Mail reports that 1,400 of those recruits were permanent residents, not citizens. DND's own figures put the Regular Force at 68,714 on August 31 of this year — 2,786 short of the 71,500 it is already authorised to hold. Attrition climbed to 8.5 per cent in FY2025/26, CBC reports. DND puts this year's target at 8,200 and enrolments so far at 3,210, which is 39 per cent.
The arithmetic doesn't close, and Ottawa knows it. The Auditor General said as much in writing: Karen Hogan found the Forces were "not recruiting enough people to meet operational needs" — and she meant the needs they have today, not the ones in the May 30 document. The best voluntary year we have had in three decades delivers about seven thousand people. The plan needs sixty times that. There is exactly one tool that closes a gap of that size, and it has a name. You cannot volunteer half a million people into uniform. You can conscript them.
And 85,000 regular troops is the part that sounds reasonable. Spread over a decade it almost does. So run DND's own attrition against it: 8.5 per cent of 68,714 is about 5,800 people leaving every year, against the 7,310 who came in during the best year since the nineties. Net growth of roughly fifteen hundred. At that rate the Regular Force reaches the strength it is already authorised to hold in about two years — and the extra 85,000 arrives in the 2080s.
So look at who the plan reached for first. CBC reports that the document said the supplementary force should initially prioritise "volunteer public servants at the federal and provincial level". Ottawa's own employees — the people whose paycheques clear because Ottawa says so. Volunteering is a different word when it is your employer doing the asking. Of all the millions of Canadians the plan could have started with, it started with the ones who can be told — the ones for whom a request from Ottawa is also an instruction.
Then the rest of us found out, and the story changed. The Ottawa Citizen reports that Carignan is having second thoughts about recruiting public servants. Defence Minister McGuinty says the priority right now is 12,000 to 15,000 more regulars and reservists, and he has recast the reserves plan around emergency relief. The Globe and Mail notes the mobilisation plan has not been approved and has not been funded.
Run that sequence again. A document gets signed in May. It reaches first for the people Ottawa employs. The public reacts. The Chief has second thoughts. The minister starts calling it emergency relief and names a number thirty times smaller. That is a trial balloon coming down, not a plan being cancelled — a number floated to see what we would swallow, hauled back in when the answer came. Nobody floats a number like that without meaning to come back for it under a name we will like better.
There is a real case for the softer version, and it deserves an answer. A wildfire season genuinely does need thousands of trained hands — and the Forces have spent years being pulled off everything else to supply them. Fair enough. But a relief roster is built around equipment, logistics and a fortnight of hard work, and nobody needs 300,000 names for that. The signed document did not say relief. When the words change and the number stays, the number is the plan.
And it is the same people asking. Chrystia Freeland, who announced the freezing of convoy protesters' bank accounts, still sits at the cabinet table as Minister of Transport. Trudeau made Mark Carney chair of his economic task force in September 2024, six months before Carney had the job, and most of the cabinet carried straight over. The government doing the asking isn't a new one. It's the government that was already there — a different face at the front, the same table behind it.
And it has nothing to offer. Justin Trudeau described Canada to the New York Times Magazine in December 2015 as "the first post-national state". That phrase reaches the recruiting desk eventually. A post-national state has nothing to hand our nineteen-year-olds except a wage, because it spent ten years explaining that there was nothing in particular here to belong to.
That cabinet has now made the largest military commitment in our lifetimes. At the NATO summit in The Hague, Carney committed Canada to five per cent of GDP on defence by 2035, which he put at roughly $150 billion a year. CBC, CTV and the Globe all called it the biggest increase since the Second World War. It is a serious promise — and the people who would carry it out deserve a serious country standing behind them.
The 1,400 permanent residents who enlisted last year volunteered for a country that asked them to, which is more than the signatories of the May 30 document can say about the rest of us. If Article 5 is invoked — if something moves on NATO's eastern flank and Canada is asked for our people — the question of who goes won't be settled by a form on a website. It will be settled by whoever already holds the list.
Nobody asked us in May. That was never an oversight.
