Blatchford: Ballot offers few choices for Canada’s overlooked soldiers

Generally speaking, the only soldiers politicians really seem to like are veterans.

That’s of course because they are no longer actively war-fighting or militaristic, and are also often one way or another injured.

Thus, in a country that embraces the culture of the less capable and frail, they can been seen as “victims,” and indeed in this country, veterans often have been shoddily treated (Hello, Julian Fantino) by the governments that sent them off to war or peace-making, there being little pure peacekeeping any more.

So while I knew I’d heard only a little about improving the lot of veterans in this election campaign (and indeed the major parties all have a few stylish lines in their platforms about this), there has been virtually nothing said about soldiers.

There are about 100,000 serving Canada at this moment — a regular force of about 68,000 members and another 30,000 in the army, navy and air force reserves, most of them coming from the army side.

That’s a hefty and potentially huge constituency — the extended reach would include families, the widowed, friends — and yet defence/the military doesn’t even register as an issue for the media organizations which have such trackers.

There is no talk about the potential new directions for the Canadian Forces — except, of course, for a popular proposed new use of the CF to fight natural disasters.

(The reserves have done that for years, whether ice storms in Quebec, flooding in the Maritimes or forest fires out west.)

There is no party apparently considering boosting the size of the reserves while promising to cut the fat from National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa. Reservists, who are part-time soldiers, are the best bang for the buck around.

Similarly, there is no major party advocating a re-think of the military and how soldiers might be used in new ways. There is no major party demanding an overhaul of Canada’s broken procurement system, whereby the only recent success has been the lonely story of the MV Asterix.

She is a supply ship, so desperately needed that the Stephen Harper government decided to issue a single-source contract to the Chantier Davie shipyard. Then Harper was defeated, and in came Mr. Blackface and the Liberals. They wanted badly to cancel the contract, and reluctantly went ahead with it only after it became public knowledge that shelving it would cost Canadian taxpayers $89 million.

This was the information that former Vice Admiral Mark Norman, at the time the second most powerful person in the CF, was accused of leaking; in fact the Liberals’ second thoughts about the contract was ridiculously well known in Ottawa, as are so many “secret” things.

In the end, the Liberal government having thrown Norman under the bus, was forced to stay the single breach of trust charge he faced. Inshallah, he received a gorgeous settlement, but it was a terrible injustice to a man who had served his country so well for so long.

There is no one more capable and self-reliant than a soldier

But the point is, the MV Asterix, delivered on time and on budget, is the sole exception in Canadian military procurement, which is a veritable mess. Yet it appears no major party has taken a hard look at that mess.

(The exception to this was an announcement this week from the Conservatives, which promises to advocate at the United Nations for a Canadian-led peacekeeping mission in the Ukraine, strengthen Canada’s ties with NATO and NORAD and the Five Eyes, select a new fighter jet and get them in service by 2015 and get another supply ship from Chantier Davie and begin the process of replacing Canada’s submarines.)

All this sits pretty comfortably with most Canadians, too.

But for brief embraces — the war in Afghanistan, wherein ordinary people suddenly recognized there was honour in what soldiers were doing and enormous sacrifice too, was one such — where Canadians seem to “get” soldiers, in the ordinary course most don’t.

It’s a great shame.

There is no one more capable and self-reliant than a soldier. Having a big reserve force to draw upon, as opposed to a biggish standing regular force with its monstrous self-perpetrating bureaucracy, would do this country so much good.

The thing about citizen-soldiers, as reservists like to be called, is that their part-time soldiering makes them among the best and smartest citizens. The military, as a friend of mine says, also provides the “tribe” that young men and women crave and need, and it’s a far more benign and character-building tribe than any of the alternatives widely on offer, such as street gangs.

Like other natural constituencies, soldiers don’t vote in a bloc; they’re either too busy serving or filling out the paperwork or ducking the sh–that inevitably flows downhill to them.

But even if they did, who on earth would they support, when most of the parties barely acknowledges them or in the main (there are a few exceptions) even understands what it is that they do.

In this too, they have much in common with other Canadian voters.

P.S. For a good and timely read about the army reserve, and how it has had to fight (various governments, NDHQ, the CF itself) just to stay alive, Chris Champion’s new book, Relentless Struggle: Saving the Army Reserve, is all you need.

Article originally published in the National Post, Wednesday, October 2, 2019.