- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 10
I remember when I was in cadets, there were always a bunch of kids who didn't want to be there and who were forced in by their parents. Either we were being treating like a baby-sitting service, or the parents thought their kid was the next top-gun. Not unlike hockey parents who think their kid is going to be the next NHL superstar. If it were the latter, the parents themselves would become CIs, and then you'd see the meddling, where their kid is always up for promotion, and getting opportunities that should had gone to the more capable and deserving cadets who had put in the work. In the microcosm of what was my air cadet squadron, I saw how political interference destroys meritocracy. And this was precisely why I didn't join the CAF and instead opted for the private sector. I could only have imagined such nonsense on a larger scale.
Tax incentives to join, free education, while well meaning will not persuade a smart person to join the CAF.
If I want to, I can easily lower my taxes by moving to another country. Thanks to the internet, I can still make my dollars in USD or CAD. But give tax incentives to veterans and then people will inevitably look at the pool of mostly white men receiving this benefit and ask why those benefits also aren't being offered to the indigenous, or people of color? And before you know it, your well meaning tax benefit is whittled down to nothing as its dispersed to a larger cohort of people, or worse, is used as a reason to stifle wages paid to current CAF members.
Education in of itself is overvalued outside of STEM and technical training. In order for something to have value, it has to be scarce and thanks to student loans, higher education is now common place among the population. I'm in a field that has an acute shortage of people with certain technical skills. We'd normally ask for a 2 or 3 year diploma, but now we're simply looking for people with a demonstrated work ethic that we can train up from scratch. In the current worker shortage, the diploma simply isn't needed, so then what is the value of higher education in such circumstances?
If mandatory service is made law, or simply incentivized with goodies, politics will find it's way into the process somehow. Conscription will never apply equally and uniformly, there will always be voices who think they deserve more, that they deserve special treatment. You can't escape the fact that war is gruesome and ugly. Serving means that you give up part of your sovereignty and personal autonomy, while accepting the risk of suffering heinous injury or even death itself. Wanting to fight for your country is an intrinsic value that comes from within, and in order to raise a large fighting force, the majority of the population needs to feel that their country is worth fighting for.
Right now, to afford rent for a modest 1 bedroom apartment in Canada, you now need to make around 75k a year. Young people, even middle aged and older professionals can barley afford to live in the places in which they work. An entire generation is about to give up on home ownership. Some countries are now floating the idea of 50 and 60 year mortgages which means, your children will pay for the house you bought. In other words, indentured servitude. Compared to other countries our taxes are insanely high, but the trade-off was always that we got better services, and free health care. But with the collapse of hospitals, airports and other services, we're not getting what we pay for. We've been told that the environment is more important than our livelihood and so we've gutted our natural resource industries that previously supplied Canadians with meaningful, well paying jobs. If we hadn't done this, we'd have a hedge against today's hyper-inflation. And then the mandates, wokeism, etc. Rather than deal with the issues at hand that affect every day Canadians, we're lectured about our internal racism and carbon footprint, and how climate change is the real issue and is somehow directly caused by our inherent internal racism. I can go on about the nonsensory.
My point is that before we have any discussion on conscription or mandatory service, we need to have drastic, top-to-bottom political reform in this country. You want me to fight for Canada? Then convince me that Canada still works for Canadians. Until then, no thanks, I won't do it. I'll move to warmer pastures elsewhere before I ever set foot in a swearing-in ceremony, and I'll advise the young Canadians to do the same.
Last edited:
