John Robson: Gap Between ‘Social Justice Warrior’ and ‘Warrior’ Sums Up Canadian Military’s Recruiting Crisis

A staff member works at a Canadian Armed Forces recruitment centre in Ottawa on Sept. 20, 2022. The Canadian Press/Justin Tang

Commentary

It doesn’t seem so long ago that you could say “social justice” bears the same relationship to “justice” as “social worker” does to “worker,” and warn that integrating female soldiers into front-line combat would devastate military effectiveness. Nowadays such things are taboo. But the Canadian military’s recruiting crisis suggests a lingering gap between “social justice warrior” and “warrior.”

Defence is the first duty of government. Without it nothing else matters, not even civil liberties, because of the old rule that there will be an army in your country, so it better be yours. And Canada’s armed forces are far too small.

Historic regiments are mothballed, the reserves starved, our ships rust and catch fire, our fighter planes are geriatric, and we cannot field, well, a force. Which was all fun and games until it turned out the world was still dangerous despite decades of vapid rhetoric about peace, we were neither an energy nor a moral superpower, and Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were immune to our frown beams.

Even the current administration, not exactly one for military or reality matters, set out five years ago to boost the depleted ranks by thousands. Alas, their deliverology guru scuttled back to academia leaving behind only mandate letters listing hundreds of top priorities and this one, like most, proved a will-o’-the-wisp.

Some insist the problem isn’t that the military had a sex-change operation, it’s that it still needs one. The National Post quoted Brig.-Gen. Krista Brodie, in charge of recruitment and training, that “We were just starting to gain momentum when the pandemic hit” and, in a display of valour that would have awed the men at Vimy, they closed recruiting centres because of a germ.

She concedes “We are without a doubt in an applicant crisis right now.” But she blames a “cultural reckoning” about lack of diversity, those darn uniforms and stuff, before claiming, “I don’t think we’ve got a good answer anywhere.”

Sure you did. You just didn’t like it. As Kevin Myers could write back in 1995, “The IRA is the Irish Republican Army, not a thousand Danish manicurists called Karen.” And in that spirit I’d suggest that our military no longer appeals to its core demographic, brave, devoted manly souls willing to kill and die to defend hearth and home. Instead, Brodie babbles, “suitable candidates are those that first and foremost reflect the values of the Canadian Armed Forces.” A.k.a those of official Ottawa social justice warriors who despise Western civilization as much as they love identity politics.

Ottawa’s senior recruiter Petty Officer Andrew Clark soft-pedalled it: “We’re selling the benefits of being in the Canadian Armed Forces. The pension, the medical, the dental, the education piece, continuing education, as well as a pretty interesting career where you get to travel around the world, potentially, and get paid to do it.” Ah yes. Travel around the world. Visit lovely Juno Beach and, um, Taiwan?

I wonder whether the brass in their new relaxed unisex uniforms, or politicians and DND bureaucrats, read the memoirs of actual soldiers to see what motivated them. Probably not, since to the woke, history is a nightmare from which they are trying to awaken.

As the National Post added, “Recruiters are given targets to meet, with … minimum targets for female recruits and maximums for men. There is also a high-level push for what the military still refers to as ‘visible minorities’ and Indigenous people. ‘Diversity is what we’re after,’ Clark says.”

I’m all for the military welcoming recruits of all sorts. As a fellow pundit recently observed, “Canada has been defended by Canadians & people who were born elsewhere through two World Wars.” And while many of those were British-born and more recent immigrants generally aren’t, enlistment is a powerful sign of devotion to the civilization to which one has chosen to belong.

One wonders, parenthetically, whether in this Brave New Military a soldier could wear giant prosthetic breasts as part of our commitment to making the battlefield a “safe space.” But the military isn’t about “diversity.” It’s about unit cohesion. (Hence the American military’s “Army of One” campaign flopped miserably.)

As for sexual harassment, those who assumed high-ranking men and subordinate women could cooperate closely for long stressful hours and nothing would happen that cut across normal disciplinary lines were defying biology in ways you’d expect from a culture that insists there are no differences between men and the non-existent women they inherently oppress. But if we again experience full-scale combat of the sort witnessed from World War I through Korea and now Ukraine, with women blown horribly to bits beside male comrades, it will shatter the morale of our small, hapless force.

Still, being conquered by evil regimes is a small price to pay for going down with all virtue-signals flying.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.