- Reaction score
- 0
- Points
- 410
As Signalman and others have noted, the attitude of the Canadian public today is so much further ahead than where it was in the mid to late 1970's, that it's like a different planet. I was a young Militia soldier in those days, travelling in uniform on the public transit to my armoury in downtown Toronto. It was a rare trip that I did not hear some anti-military comment, get a Nazi salute, or have something yelled from a passing car. The CF got very, very little coverage in the media (of course-we weren't doing much deployed other than Cyprus in those days-our NATO commitment got very little attention except by the ban-the-bomb crowd).
We just simply NEVER got the coverage we regularly get today. Embedded reporters? Soldiers writing e-columns for the CBC? Media awareness training? Speakers' Program? Never had any of it. People serving today who are too young to remember those days may have difficulty judging just how much better off we really are now. The changes began (I think) in the recovery period after Somalia, when we changed our approach to dealing with the public and the media. Coincidentally we have almost always been deployed in some dangerous, high-visibility place since those days, which has helped our public image. Today, and for at least the last few years, I rarely encounter the negative attitudes of the old days, and I see gestures of public support that would have been unheard of in the '70s.
There are always going to be Canadians who oppose the use of the armed forces in foreign or domestic policy: that is their right and so be it. We should not look for a single-minded population in a free and diverse democracy like Canada. The fact that we exist to guarantee those rights seems to escape them, but it is true nonetheless. We just have to keep on trying to stand up and educate our fellow citizens, as some of the folks on this great site regularly try to do.
Cheers
We just simply NEVER got the coverage we regularly get today. Embedded reporters? Soldiers writing e-columns for the CBC? Media awareness training? Speakers' Program? Never had any of it. People serving today who are too young to remember those days may have difficulty judging just how much better off we really are now. The changes began (I think) in the recovery period after Somalia, when we changed our approach to dealing with the public and the media. Coincidentally we have almost always been deployed in some dangerous, high-visibility place since those days, which has helped our public image. Today, and for at least the last few years, I rarely encounter the negative attitudes of the old days, and I see gestures of public support that would have been unheard of in the '70s.
There are always going to be Canadians who oppose the use of the armed forces in foreign or domestic policy: that is their right and so be it. We should not look for a single-minded population in a free and diverse democracy like Canada. The fact that we exist to guarantee those rights seems to escape them, but it is true nonetheless. We just have to keep on trying to stand up and educate our fellow citizens, as some of the folks on this great site regularly try to do.
Cheers