Opening The Canadian Armed Forces to Permanent Residents

 Yesterday, news broke that the Canadian Armed Forces will be open to permanent residents.  I had heard rumors of this at the recent Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society-Canada conference which had a bunch of people from CAF Personnel, the Culture and Professional Conduct Command, the Director General for Military Personnel Research and Analysis and more.  

This is such a no-brainer I have been advocating for it and more (see below) for the past few years.  It would make sense even if the military was not down at least 10,000 and facing a real personnel/recruiting/retention crisis.  How so?  Let me listicle:

1. One of the basics of any kind of recruiting is you want as deep and as wide a pool as possible so that you can then get picky and be selective.
2. New immigrants will have language skills that the CAF will need as it engages in expeditions around the world.
3. Diversity, yes, is a good unto its own.  Having diverse perspectives facilitates greater creativity, more constructive criticism, less adherence to outdated ideas. There is actually a good bit of social science behind this.  
4. The CAF needs change to its culture as the sexual misconduct and abuse of power crisis has amply demonstrated.  One way to change a culture is to stop depending on the same groups for one's recruits.  A key scandal illustrates this nice.  Several years ago, some of the cadets at the Royal Military College verbally harassed visiting youngesters who were in cadet programs that could have led them to the RMC.  When an officer called out the harassment and punished the offending cadets, they called their parents who apparently included senior officers who then got the officer punished instead of the cadets.  So, the CAF (and other militaries) have long depended on military families, which has its benefits, but also create a sense of entitlement which then breeds the abuse of power.  Is it an accident that Jon Vance who abused his power long before he became Chief of Defence Staff is the son of a Lieutenant General and former Vice Chief?  Hmmm.

And then there is the current personnel shortage.  Which makes the obvious more obvious.  Why resist the obvious?  Some will argue that there is a risk that the permanent residents are not real citizens and are not as loyal to their country than actual citizens.  Um, have you taken a look at the greatest threat to Canadian security these days?  That would be far right extremists/white supremacists.  They are citizens, but their loyalty is not to democracy, good governance, and all that stuff.  Including more permanent residents, who are more likely to have non-European backgrounds than the traditional recruiting pools, will have the added benefits of bringing in people who are less likely to be white supremacists and are more likely to antagonize those far right extremists who are in the CAF--making them easier to identify and also perhaps driving them out.  

Why else resist the obvious?  I always heard that security clearances were a hurdle--that it is hard to get the info needed about those who lived elsewhere.  Hard is not a good enough reason to deny access to a huge pool of potential recruits.  How risky is it to have less than completely vetted people in the first few jobs in the military?  How much of a threat do they pose to secrets as new recruits?  It is also the case that the vetting can continue (and should continue) as they serve.  And as a general told me recently, there is always risk--you just have to figure out ways to mitigate it.

Oh, and some folks in the CAF and in the political system may not want to include these "others" because they are "others"--that they want to keep the CAF an old boys network and they want to keep it the very white institution it has been.  The less satisfied these folks are, the better.

I have been arguing that the CAF should go further, and this would require legislation: make service in the CAF a pathway to citizenship. Encourage folks from other countries to come to Canada and then get permanent residency and then citizenship faster/easier if they serve in the military.  There are some criticisms one can lodge here

• that the CAF isn't special and we should do the same kind of thing for other needed professions (such as medical ones)
• that this is exploitative of other places and somewhat colonial/imperial
• that the security clearance thing would be harder still

The first objection is the kind of "hey, you can't do one good thing unless you do other good things" which drives me crazy.  If we can't improve on all dimensions, how about we improve on one?  Plus the medical thing is mostly a provincial problem--that other professions require certification from whichever province the person wants to work.  This is not a problem for the CAF, of course. The second is fair, and I don't have a good response other than to shrug. The third is again a risk but we have to take risks to offset other risks.  

 

Yes, the CAF may have to get smaller before it gets larger, as the CDS has acknowledged.  But it is both good for the numbers and good for the health of the CAF and of civil-military relations to have a military that looks like the society.  Given that something like 25% of Canadians were born abroad, it is time we make the military a more welcoming place for the newer Canadians.

CDSN COVID Response Briefing Note, Personnel

Last week, members of the Canadian Defence and Security Network, along with networks funded by the Department of National Defence (SPNET [Concordia-based group of engineers working on tech-related policy, like AI], the Defence and Security Foresight Group,and the North American and Arctic Defence and Security Network) met via zoom to discuss a series of questions that DND gave us and some we developed.  I am discussing each piece, day by day.  I discussed Operations on Wednesday, Security yesterday, and now Personnel. Caveats: I have less knowledge of personnel issues, so take my comments here with a larger grain of salt than usual; and I did not sit in on that group's discussions.  

How does Op Laser impact preparedness and readiness? Do we need to think of an increased role for the reserves as we think of potential future pandemics? How is Op Laser impacting the willingness to deploy of both the reg force and reserves?

• The regular force and reserves are impacted differently. One key consideration here is the lack of job security reservists might have in their day job & how that impacts deployability.
• Deployments during pandemic creates additional stressors on military families as usual resources are not available, plus kids are not in school. It is harder to deploy when your own family is not safe and secure and is exacerbated for dual-military couples.
• Reservations were expressed about the CAF stepping into eldercare. This drains the CAF of its own healthcare capability and is not a sustainable solution.

The challenge, as always, is that the Canadian Armed Forces throws at a problem two different groups of people, who have different assets and constraints.  The reservists have all kinds of regular jobs that give them skills that help them interact with civilians and do the non-kinetic stuff mostly better than the regulars.  However, the Regulars live mostly apart from society since their bases tend to be away from the cities, which in a time of pandemic gives them less exposure to the disease.  Deployments, while still disruptive for regulars, are part of their normal cycles.  For reserves, deployments are far more disruptive.  When deployments happen at a time of high unemployment, the reservists are under even greater stress. So, the CAF needs to take seriously how the economic crisis is affecting the reservists (even though it may lead to a boom in recruitments) differently than the Regulars.

The Regulars themselves are under great stress, as schools and day cares being closed means that they do are parenting and schooling and working all at the same time.  And if they are sent to do stuff, like work in elder care facilities, there is far less support for their families than normal.  Like everywhere else, if you want folks to work, you need to find ways to take care of those for whom they are responsible.

The most visible role played by the CAF has been the deployment of troops into eldercare facilities.  Why them?  Because who else can you train and send in significant numbers?  No other organization in government has the numbers to send people into situations like this.  Are these troops trained to handle the challenges of taking care of old, fragile people including many with varying degrees of diminished mental faculties?  Surely, they are not as trained as those they are replacing.  And it also brings in intersectionality--that young men are replacing older woman.  That may have unexpected impacts in the facilities.  Obviously, this is a short-term solution.  One that raises some risks for the force since these folks are being sent into the hottest of the hotzones in Canada (other than prisons and meatpacking plants).  So, this might be the most significant contribution the CAF has performed thus far in this crisis, but it is not without its challenges.

There are more personnel issues that this pandemic has produced, but this is what we had time to discuss.  Why?  Because we were sensitive to the personnel issues of our network--we can't expect large numbers of people to hang around online for many hours when they have kids at home.  Next time we do this, we will probably aim for smaller groups and more focus as we cannot expect people to dedicate lots of time, especially women who are bearing the brunt of the dependent care.