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That’s why we need voluntary national service now. Conscription is not the answer: its coerciveness would undermine its legitimacy, and the Canadian Armed Forces doesn’t have the capacity to manage half a million 18-year-olds annually. Instead, national service in Canada should be voluntary, designed to mobilize our human talent and build networks of public trust — and a cohesive identity — that will serve us well in the tough times to come.

Our northern European allies are experimenting with whole-of-society defences, and their experience demonstrates that a Canadian program should have four components:

National Youth Development

The cadet and scouting movements together reach more than 100,000 Canadian youth. We should expand those programs to reach half a million or more and allow every teenager in Canada to see the country, learn new skills and engage with different communities. These would not be our parents’ cadet corps or scout troupes: We need fire, police and ambulance cadets. We need scouts for drones, 3D printing and carpentry. We need sponsorship by electrical unions and tech companies, as well as media and public-affairs organizations. Entrepreneurial skills and knowledge of food security, environmental protection and the circular economy should be fostered to help Canadians who are about to join the working world succeed.

Community Protection

Youth development can’t be achieved through top-down edicts; we don’t want a Canada made up of red-scarved pioneers chanting party lines. Rather, it should be embedded in a program that mobilizes multigenerational civilian volunteers to support first responders in building resilient and self-sufficient communities. It’s not enough to have a go-bag and 72 hours’ worth of food and water. Citizens across Canada should be well organized and prepared for emergencies — fires, floods, ice storms, earthquakes — because we don’t know what’s coming. In the worst case, we’ll need to be ready for nonviolent resistance to occupation. Through a Community Protection program, civilian volunteers in every community could learn new skills, network across social barriers and train to protect their neighbours.

National Civil Defence

A cadre of civilian volunteers equipped with key skills — including first aid, traffic control, shelter management, utilities repair, communications maintenance and interorganizational co-operation — should also be ready for emergency deployment anywhere in Canada. To accommodate part-time and family commitments, training could be completed online or during evenings and weekends with Community Protection volunteers, with arrangements made for regular upgrades.

National Service for Security

Although Canada is facing an existential threat, that threat so far has been nonviolent. Still, we need Canadian talent of all kinds to sign up, for periods of 12 months or more, to a program that would include paid uniformed service and specialist civilian roles. Common training across the Armed Forces, the RCMP, the Canadian Border Services Agency and the Canadian Coast Guard, among others, would break down barriers between these sister services. And scholarships, travel credits, tax points and benefits plans could all help to incentivize long-term engagement.

None of this would be cheap. But if Canadians want to sustain our remarkable society and the quality of life it provides, we must create institutions and programs that draw us together and motivate us to serve.