Ted Campbell looks at the state of the reserves, specifically the Army Reserve:
For those interested, and every thinking Canadian should have some, albeit limited interest in the subject, there is an interesting thread over on Army.ca which deals with the problems (there are a lot of them) in making Canada’s reserve Army (the militia if you’re old enough) into an effective force.
I’m going to go with what I think is the majority opinion and say that our Army reserve, in particular, is ineffective. That does not mean that it does not do yeoman service: Canada’s tiny regular Army could not have conducted sustained combat operations in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2014 unless thousands and thousands of reserve force soldiers had stepped up. They were mostly young men, many looking for some combination of a full-time job, some adventure, a faster route into the regular Army, or even a sort of “gap year” experience, but some, like Canada’s current Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, were middle-aged senior officers when they took a year off from their civilian careers to serve. Today, as I write many reserve force soldiers are serving in a new sort of front-line: long term care facilities that have been ravaged by the COVID-19 virus. The one problem that Canada does NOT have in its Army (regular or reserve) is the quality of the people who serve ~ they are, by and large, amongst the best soldiers in the world and, equally, especially the reservists, Canada’s finest citizens.
But too many people seem to be content with the notion that reserve Army is doing enough by providing a pool of individuals to fill up or augment regular Army units in an emergency. If that’s all the country wants, if that’s the level of capability for which we are willing to settle, then I think we, as a nation, do not deserve the service of the men and women in our reserve Army units.
