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he relations between the Canadian RegularArmy and the Militia or
Reserve Force havenever been good. As a 12-year-old high
schoolcadet at summer camp in 1951, I still recall aRegular
lieutenant's referring bluntly and feel-.to "the f...ing Militia."
As a commissioner onthe Special Commission on the Restructuring of
theReserves in 1995, I watched a high school principal,the honorary
lieutenant-colonel of a Windsor Militiaregiment, boil over with
red-faced fury at a meetingwith senior and junior officers, pouring
bile on theRegulars who appropriated the budget and the equip-ment
and, worst of all, high-hatted the part-time sol-diers. There are
two mutually antithetical cultures atwork here and there always
have been, and the declin-ing defence budgets of the last four
decades have onlyexacerbated matters.
neer labour. If the crisis was great, as in the War of1812,
volunteers could be enrolled in local regiments,regulars in all but
name who usually fought well. Thevictory at Chateauguay in 1813,
for example, camewhen Colonel de Salaberry led the regiment he
hadraised and trained intq battle against superiorAmerican forces.
Predictably, however, the militiamenand their heirs persuaded
hemselves that they had wonthe war. Egerton Ryerson, writing in
1880, expressedthis fairy tale in its grandest terms: "The Spartan
bandsof Canadian Loyalist volunteers, aided by a few hun-dred
English soldiers and civilized Indians, repelledthe Persian
thousands of democratic Americaninvaders, and maintained the virgin
soil of Canadaunpolluted by the foot of the plundering
invader."JThat this was completely untrue' ,mattered not at all.The
Militia myth had a power of its own, one thatshaped Canadian
defence.The story goes back well before my 1951 exposureto
intra-army conflict. The Militia in Canada antedatesthe Regulars by
centuries. The milice in French Canadaformed the colony's defence
against the Iroquois andthe English, working with regular regiments
fromFrance, and bringing to local wars a knowledge of theground and
a far more willing adaptation to it than theprofessionals. In
British North America, the regularsdid most of the fighting, but
the Militia served in therear, carried messages, and performed
necessary pio-
The creation of a tiny Regular army, the PermanentForce, in
1873, did nothing to alter the myth.Professional soldiers were
parasites, layabouts, drunk-ards and wastrels as far as the public
was concerned -the unemployable who squandered the government'sDr.
J L. Granatstein, former Director and CEO of the Canadian
WarMuseum, s Distinguished Research Professor of History Emeritus
atYork University.
Summer 2002 .Canadian Military Journal 5
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money that might better be used to build post officesand
wharves. Canada's ultimate defence rested with itscitizenry as it
always had -and, of course, there wasmuch truth in that. A tiny
Permanent Force could notdefend Canada against ts then-likely
enemy, he UnitedStates, but it could train the Militia, The
difficulty wasthat governments ordinarily had no interest in
defence.Essentially, John A. Macdonald and his successorshad
Canadian Corps, for example, had become professoldiers in
everything but name, well beforeArmistice of 11 November
1918.Perhaps his sense hat military efficiency realmatter underlay
the successive ationalization~ to wthe Militia was subjected. In
1921, many units andunits died and many more were consolidated; the
thing happened in 1936, in 1946the Second World War, in 1954 114
armouries were closed, and ag1964 and 1968-69. On every occthe
Regular Forces pressed he issuof the desire for efficiency and an
etive and balanced force of armsservices; on every occasion,
thereprotests across the country fromunlucky units and small
townsargued that the Militia was the fooof the Army, the link
between.
and the military. The net result wdecline in numbers; the
sharpesfrom 46,763 in 1964 to 19,855 inand 12,865 the next
year.
.What truly weakened the Militiathe post-Second World War
era,er, was the eombination of doctrinethe lack of: money. During
theWar, the possibility of nuclearforced the government into
thethat forces-in-being were all thattered.3 If the Reserves were
to any use at all, it was only for whacalled National Survival, the
tasrescuing survivors from therubble of urban Canada. At thetime
that this policy came to the fothe end of the 1950s, the governmenA
Militia soldier preparing o load a C-6 machine-gun uringan
exerciseat CampWainwright, fiscal difficult~, began the ]Alberta,
November 001. process of cutting defence budgets.post-war golden
age that had seeRegular Army reach a strength of 50,000 was
gongood; in its place was an Army and a Canadian Fthat had
ever-more obsolescent equipment, shrinnumbers, and an attenuated
Reserve Force. There efforts to give mobilization-based tasks to
Militia in the abortive. Corps 86 Concept of the mid-1(including an
airborne platoon and rifle companieRegular infantry battalions), in
the Total Force proals of the 1987 White Paper on Defence, and in
a
Reserve Modernization Plan that made some head;The Canadian
Forces, however, were under increapressure as numbers dropped and
budgets were Ifrozen or fell.
decided that they had other priorities. Why then spendmoney on
defence? The sums spent were always small,the Militia was a swamp
of patronage and inefficiency,and the Permanent Force was little
better.2Paradoxically, when there were threats at home
orabroad,-Canadians demanded instant success and greatefficiency of
their men in uniform. In the North WestRebellion of 1885, in the
South African War, in the
Great War and in the Second World War, Canadian sol-diers
learned on the job and did well to 'huzzahs' fromthose at home. No
one had ever doubted that Canadianswere good material; making good
soldiers out of them,however, was only achieved at a heavy cost in
blood. Inthe Great War, the Militia provided the officers for
theFirst Contingent, and many of the officers and men forthe full
corps that eventually took the field. This wastrue in the Second
World War, in Korea, and in thebrigade group that was dispatched
for NATO service in1951. The Militia mattered, to be sure, but the
Militiamyth that only the part-time soldiers mattered
grewincreasingly irrelevant as war technology grew morecomplex. The
officers and NCOs of the First World War
Paradoxically, at the same time as the Regbegan a long struggle
to preserve some minimal cocapability as the Cold War ended,
successive goments dispatched troops in ever-greater
numbepeacekeeping, peace-enforcing and war-fighting overseas. So
strapped was the Army for soldiers tits units that the Reserve, ts
numbers as low as 1to 14,000 in the 1990s, became more
importantever in meeting augmentation needs.6 Canadian Military
Journal. Summer 2
