Campuses and Canada’s gentle military
“I promise on my honour to do my duty to God, the Queen and my country.”
Kendra Ballingall, Staff
You may have missed the ads in the Manitoban: the Canadian Forces are hiring. Strong and proud, today’s Canadian Forces are expanding — engineers, pilots, pharmacists and naval officers are all in demand; you could “enjoy a career with a difference.” “Duty with honour” — such is the proposed reward of a profession of arms.
While some Canadian Universities remain unconcerned about the militarization of student space, others are more critical. Students at UBC are currently organizing to resist the presence of recruiters. Concordia University in Montreal has a policy banning military recruitment on campus entirely, and the Link, Concordia’s independent student newspaper, includes the Canadian Forces on its advertising boycott list. While the ad in the Manitoban appears in Canadian University Press papers across Canada, it is a subtle presence.
By contrast, recruitment campaigns at U.S. colleges and even high schools are loud spectacles promising thrill and adventure. Recruiters ride hummers into classrooms, blast 50 Cent at lunch hour and offer free T-shirts. Since the No Child Left Behind policy was implemented in 2002, schools in the U.S. have been required to provide the government with each student’s name, home address and phone number. This information is then forwarded to the Department of National Defense to be used in tailored military recruitment campaigns that often target low-income and minority high school students. Many students are unaware that they must actively opt out of this automatic process in order to avoid recruitment attempts.
Clearly, Canada is not operating with the sheer power and resources of the U.S. military and does not need the aggressive tactics of U.S. recruiters to replenish its reserves. But as the largest employer in Canada, what do the Canadian Forces stand to gain by marketing to Canadian university and college students?
In the next five years, an additional $12.8 billion will be spent on the defence department; most of it will be used to increase the size of troops. The majority of new recruits are needed for Canada’s “stabilization and reconstruction” endeavours in Afghanistan, where 2,500 Canadian troops, six ships and six aircraft have been deployed. Teeming with young and healthy students, campuses are a logical source for new recruits to fill the ranks.
As an employer, the Canadian Forces has a lot to offer: competitive wages, medical and dental care, pension, and parental leave are listed on their website, and members of the primary reserve can have up to $8,000 of their postsecondary tuition fees reimbursed.
“Duty with Honour,” the official recruitment brochure of the Canadian Forces, claims, “the fundamental purpose of the Canadian profession of arms is the ordered, lawful application of military force pursuant to governmental direction.”
Yet pursuing a career with the Canadian Forces is no guarantee that your profession will be “ordered,” “lawful,” or “pursuant to governmental direction,” (if that is even the criteria you consider when looking for a job). It is also no guarantee that your profession will fulfill the mandate of the Canadian Forces itself, by upholding the “same values and beliefs as the society it defends,” including the democratic ideal, order and good government, the concept of peace, the rule of law, rights and freedoms, and respect and dignity for all persons.
The difference between U.S. and Canadian militarization of schools lies in the myth that Canada is a peacekeeping nation. Unlike the U.S. defence forces, the Canadian Forces depends on its self-image and international reputation as a global peacekeeper, a “gentle military.”
There is no shortage of evidence contradicting Canada’s lawful use of force and nearly pristine image of the blue berets; Canada’s military history is no more than the history of one state’s appeasement of the dominant Empire, whether British or American.
A few examples: Through the UN, Canada is currently supporting the ouster of the democratically elected President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, along with the political repression by brutal force of supporters of his Lavalas movement.
Canada under Jean Chretien may have provided merely “moral” support to the “Coalition of the Willing” who were following the U.S. in the illegal invasion of Iraq, but it now certainly has no qualms about reaping the profits of the reconstruction effort in that country.
Besides, Canada needs to keep some of its troops at home to suppress Indigenous resistance and protect golf courses, as it did with the 1990 dispute between the Mohawk people of the Kanesatake reserve and the town of Oka, Quebec.
Popular disapproval of the U.S.-led War on Terrorism is alive and well. Although it went scarcely reported in mainstream media, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched in cities worldwide as recently as September 24, 2005. The protestors demanded, “U.S. and U.K. out of Iraq, Canada out of Afghanistan.” Hundreds of thousands of people see the War on Terrorism as a racist and imperialist project.
This evidence makes recruitment campaigns on campus and in the students’ newspapers contradictory to the mandate of both the university — as an educational, not a militant, institution, and the Manitoban — as a forum for critical debate and an agent of social change that refuses to publish editorial and ad content deemed discriminatory, racist, sexist, homophobic or hateful.
So, there may be benefits to being a soldier (including “challenge, travel, and opportunity” in a context of armed conflict!), yet one thing seems clear, if military recruitment campaigns are normalized and accepted on campuses across Canada, the Canadian Forces are indeed in line with the values of society: not peace, rights or dignity — not freedom to self-determine or freedom from death — but the uncritical militarization of state-serving citizens, beginning with youth.
