By Scott Taylor
The latest media crap-storm to hit the Canadian Armed Forces is clearly the responsibility of the very senior leadership tasked with steering Canada's military institution away from such pitfalls.
It started with a startling headline in the October 31 edition of the Ottawa Citizen. "Canadian Military wants mobilization plan in place to boost reserves to 400,000 personnel".
The initial story was based on an internal document issued on May 30, 2025 which established a top level 'tiger team' to create a Defence Mobilization Plan (DMP) with the goal of increasing the primary reserves from 23,561 to 100,000 personnel and ballooning the current 4,384 souls listed on the Supplementary Reserve list to a staggering 300,000. This plan had been hatched by none other than Chief of Defence Staff, General Jennie Carignan and the Department of National Defence (DND) Deputy Minister Stefanie Beck.
The details were scant in the Ottawa Citizen's first story and I wrote a commentary to the effect that the CAF are currently woefully understrength at present and according to the latest Auditor General's report, they cannot properly house those still in uniform.
However, since that juncture more details of the DMP were made public by Ottawa Citizen reporter David Pugliese who had obtained a full copy of the unclassified, nine page DMP document. The second Citizen headline read "Canadian Military will rely on an army of public servants to boost ranks by 300,000".
Naturally this served to scare the bejeezus out of the legion of Ottawa based public servants as they read their newspaper at the breakfast table.
For those martial minded Canadians who would welcome the notion of employing mandatory service to boost the ranks of the CAF, worse news was to follow. The Citizen story revealed that new recruits for the supplementary reserve would be given a one-week training course in how to handle firearms, drive trucks and fly drones.
After their initial entry into the supplementary ranks, these new recruits would be required to do one week’s worth of military training each year, but would not be issued uniforms. Medical coverage would be provided for their annual military service, but that time would not count towards their public service pensions, according to the DMP.
For those not familiar with the terms 'Primary' and 'Supplementary Reserves' those in the Primary reserve are enrolled in active units and conduct part time training on a year-round basis. Traditionally the Supplementary Reserve was a list of former regular and reserve personnel who pledged to return to duty in the case of a war or national emergency. Sadly, due to post Cold War administrative neglect that Supplementary Reserve list stands today at just 4,384 veterans willing to return to serve.
Just to clarify the point, in the past, all of those considered a 'reservist' would have obtained actual experience and training in a military occupation. What this latest proposal calls for is for nearly 75,000 additional primary reserve personnel plus nearly 300,000 one-week-Supplementary-reserve-wonders, without uniforms.
Furthermore, the DMP document clearly states, "The entry criteria for the Supplementary or other Reserve should be less restrictive than the Reserve Force for age limits as well as physical and fitness requirements.”
So I'm guessing they are not looking to recruit elite warriors to this new force.
For a direct comparison, the Canadian Corps of Commissionaires has a one week (40 hours) entry level training course to graduate a basic security guard. However, as the Corps of Commissionaires are the largest employer of Canadian veterans in Canada, this nationwide legion of security guards would still have more collective military experience than the currently proposed one-week-wonder Supplementary Reservists. Plus, the Commissionaires supply their personnel with full uniforms.
But I digress. In response to the details of the DMP being published in the Citizen, military themed social media platforms exploded with a barrage of commentary filled with ridicule and incredulity towards the CAF leadership.
Other media outlets picked up the story and during a CTV television interview on Remembrance Day, General Carignan told host Omar Sachedina that her DMP plan was "not focused directly to public servants. Our public servants are already contributing extensively to the work we are doing in defence". Carignan then went even further by claiming that the Ottawa Citizen articles about her mobilization scheme "are not quite correct."
In response, the Ottawa Citizen subsequently called Carignan's bluff. They published the exact quote from the DMP complete with a screen shot of the original document which she had co-authored. "It [the DMP] should initially prioritize volunteer public servants at the federal and provincial/territorial level." wrote Carignan.
When asked by Citizen reporter David Pugliese to clarify which of his stories facts were not accurate, Canada's top soldier declined to give additional comment.
General Carignan’s deflective response to CTV did not surprise Colonel (ret'd) Brett Boudreau a former senior public affairs officer at DND. Boudreau told the Citizen, “The gut instinct, still, of most senior CAF leaders is to blame everyone but themselves, usually to scapegoat the media, for military-related coverage they do not like, for whatever reason, even if embarrassment is well and truly deserved,” he said. “It’s a curious feature of, and sad commentary about, a seriously dated institutional mindset toward the public communications function.”
One has to wonder what sort of advice General Carignan is getting from her current legion of public affairs experts. It should have been evident from the very first Citizen story that Pugliese had obtained a hard copy of the internal document from which he was quoting.
To try and deny or diminish your own comments once they have been ridiculed in public is not good leadership.
Especially when a reporter like Pugliese is only going to come back at you armed with the receipts.
As for the original plan itself, the question begs: Did we learn nothing from our experience in Afghanistan? We helped create an Afghan Security force of nearly 400,000 poorly trained, unmotivated individuals who at least had uniforms. However, when the balloon went up the whole Afghan security force simply evaporated.
I hate to think of what would happen in a scenario where Canada had to go to war with a military reserve force of 300,000 public servants, who only had one week of training, and no uniforms.
