The war drums are calling

The currents have been building for national service in Canada. The promised climate corps pilot, Divided but opinionated Hub articles both con and more recently pro. And polling shows that even with regard to military national service, the Canadian populous is either ready or open to consider the issue.

I’d be surprised if there aren’t at least some smart Liberals in Ottawa considering the issue as well. The reason the currents are building are not complicated, we are at a moment of an increasing gulf between youth and wider labour market unemployment. At the same time, the government wants to increase military spending and military readiness. With patriotism also at a recent apogee vis-à-vis American manifesting their destiny delusions, the time is probably right for a party to bring in national service, if it was an underlying goal for them.

What say you – the affected?

Let’s be honest, the government is probably not going to bring in national service for 40 year old lawyers in the near-middle of their earning years. Any national service is going to affect the youth. And with the collective mantle of youth not really being tried to be held by any individual, possibly with the exception of a professor presumably pushing 50, there’s a bit of a vacuum on the commentary where those opining on mandatory national service are never going to go through it.

Student associations are well-placed to speak about it. While it affects all youth, not just their membership, their membership are definitely going to be opinionated about it, especially because a year of work lost costs more on average to one who is university educated than one who is in an apprenticeship or never went to post-secondary. At the same time, as someone who has recently felt that post-secondary education could be much improved by having the start of attendance be later, maybe there will be student associations that could be very pro-national service – done right.

Student associations have the resources to coordinate and do international research on impact and compensation, maybe put their own polling in the field that actually weighs costs, and there are various bodies, most notably the national supraunions, CFS and CASA, who could be doing policy development in the space.

Policy futures

There’s no shortage of space for a detailed policy paper here, and the student space trying to stake out the space. Is there value in having 18 year olds learning to fire an AR-15? To having someone have to commit a year between 21 and 30 to pulling phragmites? To forcing some manosphere late-teens to spend 6 months provide seniorcare before being considered having the ability to opine on Canadian policy?

National service could be excellent, an egalitarian neo-Katimavik that forces together those with everything different about each other except nationality. It could improve soft skills for employment and improve sentiment towards the government and each other, it could provide a serious relief valve on youth unemployment while providing an effective trial for a new generation of guaranteed employment programs. It could also be horrible, fostering government resentment, toxic variants of regionalism, and general non-benefits for the attendees while perfectly catering to the wants of those who will never need to undergo the process.

What needs to be figured out?

The associations need to think about whether they want national service or not. If not, they should probably start seeding the ground to strengthen the case against reasonable limits clause of the Charter being invoked to support national service.

We don’t need to get into the legal minutiae, but there’s a lot of Charter work to be thought through and consolidated here

Mandatory national service almost definitely contravenes sections 2(d) (associational freedom) and 6(2)(b) (freedom to pursue a livelihood), not to mention that you could make cases under Section 7, Section 15(1) and Section 26 as well. These are all undone if the government can show the reasonable need for the measure. It is hard to imagine that even in light of changing foreign affairs that the program is truly necessary and of burning need. On the military side, one could always point toward good recruitment numbers and the ability to raise compensation. In the non-military source, one could probably point to private companies that offer the same services that students would pursue. If “national identity” is the pressing need, some well placed polling questions or comparative public policy could probably shake it loose, and some opinion pieces on age discrimination not being enforceable under the need for patriotism would likely erode the credibility of that argument as well.

There probably are various concerns that could also be raised under National Youth Rights Act likely to be proposed by the Conservative minister for youth whenever the next Conservative government arises. The various rights that are being quietly discussed will probably hit the order paper in a way that prevents national service, and probably be introduced under a Minister like Raquel Dancho, a shoe-in given her Manitoba seat, regional allocation in cabinet and her former critic role.

An anti-national-service student association can also probably highlight that for every desired outcome, there are other levers already available. Lack of participation is an expression of autonomy, not lack of opportunity. RMC exists, being a paid reservist already exists, the ability to volunteer at a nursing home already exists, the ability to do the Explore program already exists. Highlighting that if they’re desirable those offerings should be improved can move the public sentiment toward a place of seeing national service as coercive, not additive.

Ideally, even for an association that wants national service, they should probably want such service to be optional, with incentives at such a level that make participation incredibly widespread. On the flipside of the earlier argument, there may well be comparative research that shows that national service has benefits for participants that go beyond the benefits experienced by those who only participate voluntarily, and while I’m skeptical, it is worth taking a look into and collecting into findings.

Any paper should consider target audience. Why should national service be constrained to those under 25? Maybe it should include under 40s, why should we expect youth to upend themselves but not current 30 year olds? Maybe national service shouldn’t be defined by age at all. Maybe it should only be for those for whom society has already served well, a 100% wage replacement function under EI the first year after you earn 100k in combined employment or investment income in a year?

We also need to think about the actual outcomes such a program can look to achieve and what methods have or haven’t’ been shown to accomplish them. Patriotism is very different than military aptitude, and soft skills development are different than intercultural understanding. Heck, military aptitude is different than the diversion rate of participants into the armed forces! The student association space could first assert which of these are desirable, and then assert how to achieve them.

The Exchange

One more thing. Student associations can probably explore the concept of national service as an exchange. Sure the government gets your body and your time, possibly even against your will. But what are the youth entitled to in exchange?

The first step in this is looking at comparable international programs, as well as domestic alternatives, and expanding from there. Should a participant in a mandatory reservist program be entitled to pay like a private, or like a corporal, or neither? One could probably make a case for the equivalent to any of the NATO equivalent of OR-1, OR-2 or OR-3, especially if these enlisted-cum-conscripts don’t get weekends in the style that normal enlisted do. Of course, if individuals feel they are earning far less than they might elsewhere, or god forbid, that they only be given food and board and no pay, the program will probably backfire.

But pay is only part of the equation.

Student associations could probably think about national service in concert with the overall training ecosystem. If you want to make a voluntary national service, could you connect it to a student aid supplement or apprenticeship benefit? Could you have it count towards work-integrated learning programming as a co-op credit? Could you put it smack in the middle of a degree as an opportunity to let university students do a huge swath of reading and thinking in their off hours? The last of these might sound like something that would drive resentment, but it might actually allow for the deeper kind of self-directed education and time to read that education seems to have lost and classical liberal types seem to want.

Extra Homework

Student associations have other groundwork to lay if they want to push back on national service. Does the SU world actually have an alternative solution for youth unemployment? For national identity? For sustainable military recruitment?

On the unemployment space, it is worth thinking about what the real solution that student associations want to put forward is. As a proportion of total summer employment, Canada Summer Jobs can only go so far, there’s only so much seasonal work that can be generated by existing organizations. But if youth unemployment is this crisis we call it, we should have recommendations that reach that target number.

For patriotism and military capacity, they might fall outside of what most associations see as their remit, but on the military piece at least, the student association space has been relatively quiet on the fact that the CAF is a very successful way to avoid unemployment for Canadian or PR students, and how it wants it to change. The lack of engagement would weaken the case that any association could make against reservist-style national service when they can’t pose an alternative. Likewise for national unity, maybe student associations could be doing more to think about structuring summer employment or other opportunities to get students into different locales across Canada. Bold thinking is possible, and we need more ideas, not fewer!

One idea that is new and possibly great for this space is the creation of a deep sea exploration corps. Given the relative lack of knowledge about the seafloor, and the vast amount of distance to cover, getting students with time on their hands trained to conduct cartography dives to fill in the data that computers have missed is probably a good skillset that students can learn and deploy within a single year, learning the skills at training facilities in the winter, leading into actual mapping dives in the spring through fall of their service year.

It’s probably worth noting that if student unions get behind national service, they can probably be hailed as the single most important actor in achieving net-zero, if they can get an environmental stream where they are put to work assembling direct-air capture carbon systems. And we’ll leave it there.