Canada’s mobilization plan
Canadian Military wants mobilization plan in place to boost reserves to 400,000 personnel”. For that goal their has established a “tiger team” to look at how such a massive influx can be achieved, as the current reserve strength stands at 28,000.”
The plan is intended to prepare Canada for a wide range of potential crises, from domestic natural disasters to high-intensity international conflicts. The document calls for what it describes as a “Whole of Society” approach, meaning the initiative would involve cooperation from multiple levels of government, the private sector, and the Canadian public. The directive states that the goal is to ensure the country can respond quickly and effectively to emergencies or threats by establishing the conditions needed to expand the Canadian Armed Forces and move personnel where required.
Should the regular force remain at its current authorized strength of 75,000 that would put nearly a half a million Canadians into a military uniform for the first time since the Second World War.
To put this in perspective, for the past decade the CAF have faced a personnel shortfall crisis wherein recruiting and training has failed to keep pace with the number of trained service members taking their release from the military. Out of a combined regular and reserve authorized strength of 105,000, there are currently an estimated 14,500 vacancies in the CAF. The reason the combined number is used is that many reservists have been called up to full time contracts to fill in crucial vacancies in the regular force.
At a recent Parliamentary Committee hearing, Chief of Defence Staff General Jennie Carignan reported that the Canadian Armed Forces is on track to recruit and train 6,400 personnel this fiscal year. While that is a higher number of recruits processed than in recent years, it barely keeps pace with those taking their release.
It certainly will not address the gaping 14,500 vacancies in the short term.
In fact, it was not expected that the CAF could return to its current authorized strength until 2035. Now we learn that there is a plan afoot to balloon the reserves to 100,000 primary personnel and an additional 300,000 supplementary reservists.
For those not familiar with these terms, primary reserves would consist of part time soldiers who would report to their armouries for training on a regular basis. Historically the supplementary reserve was a list of former regular and reserve force personnel who signed up to voluntarily return to service in the time of a national crisis.
What will be considered a national crisis depends on the people in government. It could be a new “plandemic”, wildfires, a migration crisis, new tariffs—whatever.
The question is: who will be in the military reserves? Will it be the new immigrants the Liberal Party has brought in over the past few years, many of whom have no long-standing roots or family connections in Canada?
We need to be aware and learn from history, where state forces have often been used against their own citizens as we witnessed during the COVID “plandemic” and during the Shuswap fire.
ST, DB
