A National Service Plan can create an army of fit, young citizen soldiers, and get our lacklustre forces into fighting shape.
The Canadian military has a recruitment problem. There are only 64,461 full-time regular troops in the Canadian military and 23,177 part-time reservists—well under the target numbers. One reason it’s hard to attract young people into the military is the commitment required. The Canadian armed forces prefers to enlist career soldiers, but few young people are prepared to promise their whole future to the military. |
Mark Towhey, a political consultant who spent his formative years as a Canadian army officer, proposes a solution: a radically reinvented National Service Plan for high school graduates that lets them spend just a couple years in the Canadian military. The commitment would be a bit longer than a gap year, but shorter than a degree program. The upshot? A pipeline of young, fit Canadians into the military. Once they leave the forces, they can serve as reservists in case war erupts—a possibility that becomes ever more likely as Trump continues to upend the world order. I can see this working. The idea of a gap year is gaining momentum in Canada, but there aren’t enough options for how to spend it: young people seeking life-altering adventures often end up in menial jobs, washing dishes or stacking groceries. A National Service Plan could be appealing. Towhey writes: “A good voluntary plan, with strong incentives, will be enough to build and grow the strong, combat-ready military Canadians want.” Visit macleans.ca for more coverage of everything that matters in Canada, and subscribe to the magazine here. —Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief, Maclean’s |
Canada Post’s collective agreement with its workers is set to expire on May 22—which means we might be due for the second nationwide postal strike in less than six months. According to economics professor Vincent Geloso, Canada urgently needs a permanent fix for the country’s neverending mail woes. “The best, and possibly the only, solution is to sell off (or privatize) the corporation,” Geloso writes in this essay for Maclean’s. The result, he says? Lower prices and higher-quality services—without the burden of higher taxes. |
Doug Sombke, president of the South Dakota Farmers Union, says Americans are just as devastated by Trump’s tariffs as we are. The ripple effects of the tariffs on farmers have been bleak: skyrocketing prices for Canadian fertilizer and machinery, sad soybean sales and a ton of hate mail from north of the border. Sombke recently spoke with Maclean’sabout surviving America’s trade war. |
In the space of two weeks, Richard Kelly Kemick’s partner came out as gay and told him she was pregnant. They ended up sticking together in the same apartment—and what could have been the end of their family turned into a new beginning. “I used to think it was a case of cosmic bad luck that Litia discovered she was pregnant after we’d broken up,” Kemick writes in this feature for Maclean’s. “Now I see how lucky we were.” |
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