Canadian Forces need to recruit warriors, not DEI hires: retired major

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Last month, while we noshed on southern-style fried chicken at a roadside eatery in Augusta, Ga., our upbeat waitress informed me she was joining the army to go to dentistry school. “Yeah, the military will pay my tuition, and then I’ll serve,” she explained. “It was a great career path for my dad.”

J.D. Vance, America’s vice-president-elect, tells a similar story. After high school, Vance enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. Using the G.I. Bill — a law that provides benefits for military veterans — Vance went on to study at Ohio State University.

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It’s a powerful story: merit recognized and ambition rewarded. Similar recruitment stories exist within Canada’s Armed Forces, but they can be obscured, by affirmative action quotas and disquieting tales of warrior culture run amok.

In a recent conversation, Barbara Krasij-Maisonneuve — a trim, 62-year-old retired major now comfortably ensconced in the Niagara Region’s wine country alongside her husband, Lt.-Gen. (retd) Michel Maisonneuve — recounts her recruitment story.

As an 18-year-old high school grad in Hamilton, Ont., Barbara signed up to serve on the lowest rung of Canada’s military ladder — a private in the Military Police. “I heard my mom and dad talking about taking a second mortgage on their house and business to send me to Carleton to study journalism,” she reports, “and I felt so ashamed … I went off to the recruiting centre to join the army.”

Following basic training, Barbara was shipped to Edmonton to serve as a military “policeman,” she chuckles. “In 1981-82, it was like going to the Wild West,” she reminisces. “The pipelines were flowing and every two weeks, when it was payday and shifts changed, the police forces (the RCMP, Edmonton city police, Alberta highway patrol and Military Police) would triple up on shifts because we knew all hell was going to break loose.”

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Barbara’s service with the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) evolved; she studied at university and then served for 21 years as a logistics officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force.

“For 20-30 years, we didn’t get the job because we were women and now we’re getting it just because we’re women. This is not progress,” bemoans Barbara when I ask about how CAF recruitment of females is going. In 2016, shortly after Justin Trudeau’s election as prime minister, then Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Jonathan Vance set a target to increase the percentage of women in the CAF from 15 per cent to at least 25 per cent by 2026.

You don’t want a warrior culture in the military? We need that culture

The target is proving difficult to reach, Barbara reports; today, roughly 17 per cent of new recruits are women. Confounding these efforts, recruiting more broadly isn’t going well; the CAF is currently short 16,500 personnel.

“If I knew nothing about Canada’s military,” Barbara reflects, “except what I see on legacy media, and I had an 18-year-old daughter, I’d say, ‘Stay away, they’re all sexual predators, it’s racist, it’s white supremacist.’” The image of Canada’s military, portrayed by media and reinforced by the government, Barbara bluntly asserts, is not inviting for new recruits.

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“This particular government is no friend of the military. The whole DEI, radical progressive movement is forced on it,” Barbara laments. “And what dismays me,” she continues, “is that it seems like a lot of our senior leaders … many of them are women now, have embraced this.”

This summer, Gen. Jennie Carignan was named Canada’s first female Chief of Defence Staff (CDS). In 2008, Carignan was the first woman to command a CAF combat arms unit and after a series of leaps and bounds, she was promoted to lieutenant-general in 2021 and named the first chief for Professional Conduct and Culture. Her daunting task was to transform the military’s culture, including cleansing the organization of sexual misconduct.

“I know Jenny. Jenny and I were classmates at RMC (Royal Military College) class of 1990,” Barbara shares. “It seemed that the women who were trying very hard to succeed in the military left their femininity behind. You know, they kind of look like men … I called them the ‘comfortable shoes brigade,’” she laughs. But that wasn’t Jenny, Barbara continues, “If Jenny had not joined the military to be a combat engineer, she was going to be a flamenco dancer.”

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“I have great faith in Jenny,” Barbara says, her tone now serious. “But realistically,” she asks, “was Trudeau gonna choose anybody but a woman for that job? He’s the biggest fake feminist that I’ve ever known.

“My hope is that one of the first moves she (Carignan) makes as CDS is to close the culture department,” Barbara says. “Just close it.”

It’s not unthinkable: other organizations are winding down overwrought DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion) bureaucracies. And in the U.S., President-elect Donald Trump appears to be acting on his threat to purge the American military of “woke” leaders; he’s picked Pete Hegseth as his secretary of defence (a Fox News commentator and veteran who questions the role of women in combat) and Trump’s transition team is reportedly contemplating a “warrior board” to fast-track the removal of “unfit” generals and admirals.

Barbara’s not suggesting cultural training isn’t essential; the military has been dealing with sexual harassment and racism prevention for decades, she reports. In the early ’90s, there was a training program called SHARP. Then Operation Honour, to protect the people you worked with, she explains, “whether it was a young guy being bullied or a woman or a BIPOC.” There was bystander training. And then came the #MeToo movement, with three fatal flaws, Barbara contends.

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The first flaw: “The movement removed burden of proof; you could just make an accusation, end somebody’s career, and walk away.” The second flaw: “This idea that every time you approach a male colleague, he’s a predator … I shudder to think what that’s done to relationships.” The third flaw: “Suddenly, women are weak again.” Barbara has been accused of victim shaming, by keyboard warriors and journalists. “But I stand by my words,” she adds, her voice quiet and resolute.

“You don’t want a warrior culture in the military?” she posits. “We need that culture, we need to recruit to that … and we have to go back to meritocracy.” We can’t keep pushing our warriors — “whether they be men, women, black, white, whatever” — to the back of the line, Barbara pleads.

And, she continues, “we need a government that’s going to say, wearing that flag on your sleeve is the most wonderful thing you can do … because the world’s a really scary place right now.”

Momentarily lost in her thoughts, she reaches for the bright red poppy pinned to her black turtleneck.

“When I joined (the military), there were 12 per cent women and a whole load of trades had just opened up to us,” Barbara reflects. “And we’ve made it to about 17 per cent.” In militaries the world over, the percentage of females serving is roughly the same and yet, she shrugs, we have a 25 per cent quota in Canada.

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The CAF has focused its recruiting on this target, Barbara rails, “and then we added all of the DEI, tiny little minority special interest groups to that quota. And now we spend money making a third bathroom or putting sanitary napkins in the men’s room and stuff, but we’re still buying our own helmets.”

But she isn’t giving up. The North needs to be protected, Barbara enthuses, and that’s a role the CAF could embrace. She knows what men and women in uniform can do. And she wants others to have the opportunity to live their own powerful story of merit recognized and ambition rewarded.

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