Canada’s esteemed military colleges live to fight another day

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Newsflash: Canada’s two military colleges will not be shuttered. But, what exactly are they to be?

On the eve of International Women’s Day last weekend, Minister of National Defence Bill Blair released an independent report signalling Canada’s two military colleges — Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston (RMC) and the Royal Military College Saint-Jean in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu (RMC Saint-Jean) — will not be mothballed.

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But the report’s 49 recommendations for reform signal change ahead in the training of military cadets including increasing the quota for female cadets to 33 per cent by 2035, eliminating the peer leadership model and physical performance tests and rejuvenating the campuses as symbols of national pride.

The fate of Canada’s military colleges was thrown into jeopardy in 2022, when former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Louise Arbour’s review of sexual misconduct in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) flagged concerns about a culture of misogyny at the two military colleges. A largely civilian panel was then tasked to decide “whether misogyny and sexual misconduct are so ingrained in the culture of the Military Colleges as to render them irremediable.”

I read the March 7 report, end to end. Unlike Americans, who speak out loud of “warrior culture” and “lethality” and “defeating enemies” (recall the language in U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearings), this milquetoast report nearly avoids the question of why military colleges or the CAF exist.

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“One of the things that struck me, quite candidly, about this report,” agrees management consultant Mike Kennedy, “is that nowhere in it do you see words like ‘war’ or ‘warrior’ or ‘combat’ or ‘killing.’ Well, there is one mention of ‘deadly force,’ one very brief mention.” People have to understand, Mike explains, “what are these places, what does the military exist to do? Killing is not something that comes to people naturally.”

Mike is not your typical military insider. In fact, he’s a 67-year-old former student at RMC who could bear a grudge. In 1976, Mike completed his first year of training at RMC, “met all the requirements,” he shares in a recent conversation, “and went off to what was called the basic officer training course in the summer after first year… To make a long story short, there were a group of us that ran into some unfortunate issues with one of our superiors who treated us pretty badly, and that’s what precipitated our leaving. So I did not graduate. I did not actually serve as a commissioned officer.”

There was a time when the military service was seen as being a very noble and prestigious profession in this country

Nonetheless, Mike has fond memories of his time at the college and has high regard for the Armed Forces. There’s a tight network among serving and former military members in Canada and Mike’s stayed connected; as a military historian shining light on Canada’s war heroes and writing extensively for alumni publications of RMC, even presiding over the Montreal branch of the RMC Club. (In his other life, he developed and ran the Leaders in Management Education awards in collaboration with the Financial Post.)

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Mike and I have had several discussions over the past year about military culture — including the bullying, the hazing — and the process by which civilians become soldiers. He’s the perfect former cadet to weigh in on what makes sense for the future of Canada’s military colleges.

You can’t develop leadership skills in young people by brutalizing them, Mike assures me. “A lot of people think that’s what military training is about. It’s not. But that being said, you have to make the training sufficiently challenging and rigorous that when people are confronted with a potentially life-threatening situation, they don’t fall apart.

“There was a time when the military service was seen as being a very noble and prestigious profession in this country,” he reflects, leaning back in his chair in his Toronto office. “There was a time when RMC was seen as being in the same league as places like McGill and Queens and U of T.”

Mike cites two major blows to that reputation: the first was unification of the Armed Forces in the 1960s and the second, “the decision by governments, starting with Pierre Trudeau, to cut back on the funding for the military to basically allocate that to social programs.”

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Mike pauses, and adds: “The other thing a lot of people don’t realize is that one of the policy decisions of the (Pierre) Trudeau government, which in hindsight was a big mistake, was to change the primary mission of the Armed Forces from one of defending Canadian sovereignty to being one of a more like an internal security force.”

It’s a significant point he’s making here; turning the military into another branch of the public service was a major shift. This March 2025 report isn’t going to reverse the CAF’s trajectory, I fear, but what’s happening in the world around us may force change in how Canadians think about recruitment and cadet training.

Watching countries in the EU — Germany financing the most rapid buildup of military in decades, Poland taking unprecedented steps to expand its army, even evaluating nuclear deterrence — it feels like the world is passing us by. Mike agrees: “In 1962 (at a time when our population was approximately 18.5 million people) the combined strength of Canada’s Armed Forces was over 126,000 people … Today, with a population of 41 million, total regular force strength is around 63,000.”

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He’s grateful the report doesn’t recommend closure of the military colleges and agrees improvements are needed. But he’s frustrated.

“It was written in the main by a group of civilians who have never served, who never went to the college themselves,” he says. “I don’t think it’s possible for anybody to understand military culture unless they actually lived in it for a period of time.”

Mike’s not ready to toss the entire report in the trash bin, and it remains to be seen how the report may be implemented.

He’s a fan of ditching the standardized physical performance tests. But he’d also like to see self-defence instruction added to the curriculum, to teach recruits how to fight and win in a life-or-death situation. “You know,” he says, “that whole idea that you have to take young people and train them for war, train them to kill or be killed.” Martial arts training, Mike adds, develops practical fighting ability and cultivates mental discipline, conditioning people to react instinctively if they are pressed into a situation where they have to defend themselves.

A recommended increase in the number of cadets in the military college system, to drive the cost-per-student down, troubles Mike. And he’s wary of the report’s recommendation to remove any authority by senior cadets over their juniors; “the whole point of the college is to inculcate leadership skills.”

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He sighs.

“People need to remember that the military colleges are institutions that on the whole have succeeded, served this country remarkably well, and when you look at what people who have gone through the system have done and contributed, and that applies not only to people that graduated, but also to a great many others who did not. What they contributed, I think, is certainly all out of proportion to the size of the institutions.”

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