Sir John A. Macdonald was contemptuous of full-time soldiers. So were most Canadians in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.
The first prime minister believed “that regulars . . . had taken up soldiering because they were good at nothing else [and] were useful only for hunting, drinking and chasing women,” Queen's University military historian Allan English wrote in his 2004 book Understanding Military Culture: A Canadian Perspective.
What the passage of years demonstrates is that cultures aren't set in concrete. They change.
Not much more than a decade ago, Canada's armed forces were all but invisible, out of sight in remote bases and discreetly dressed in civilian clothes in the cities.
Now, they march around Ottawa's streets in combat gear. They have become the heroes of middle Canada, celebrated at sporting events, remythologized as the new icons of nationalism and lionized by people such as Don Cherry, Rick Mercer and Wayne Rostad (both Mr. Mercer and Mr. Rostad have been appointed honorary colonels, along with former journalist and now senator Pamela Wallin and a clutch of some of the country's wealthiest business tycoons).
Sir John A. would be astonished. Historians and sociologists agree that there has been a profound cultural shift, that Canadians now have reimagined themselves as a military nation, lauding their army, navy and air force as never before in the country's history. The question is, how did we get here?
At the heart of the change, says Frank Graves, president of the Ottawa-based social research firm EKOS, is the continued stranglehold that the baby boomers have on Canadian society. As the boomers now age in large numbers, Mr. Graves says, they're growing more conservative and trading in their one-time open cosmopolitanism for visions of a darker world and the need for a more secure society – a view of life very much influenced by Sept. 11, 2001. These shifting boomer attitudes have lifted defence spending up from the bottom of priorities in opinion polls and given the government a green light to re-equip the military with new hardware.
But the military has also benefited from a serendipitous chain of events that has burnished its image since the 1993 Somalia affair – dubbed “Canada's national shame” – when soldiers beat a Somali teenager to death and the armed forces hierarchy tried to cover it up.
During the 1996 Saguenay River flood – Canada's worst flood of the 20th century – the efficiency and speed with which armed forces crews rescued scores of stranded people (one woman was barely lifted up in time to give birth on a helicopter) reminded Canadians of what a cherished institution the military is. In Manitoba's 1997 Red River flood, 10,000 soldiers built dikes, rescued isolated farmers and guarded abandoned houses and villages against looters. The military came to help again during Eastern Canada's 1998 ice storm, and in the Swissair disaster off Peggys Cove., N.S., in the same year.
In the 1998 Kosovo bombing campaign that so sharply divided the country's intellectuals and politicians, General Raymond Henault, deputy chief of the defence staff, was the voice of the military – in fact, of the government – on nightly television, calmly, intelligently, respectfully explaining to Canadians what was taking place.
Then there's Afghanistan.
Canadians' support for the military mission went into decline not long after it began – in contrast to their support for the military's development work there– but the deaths of our soldiers have had a profound effect on the nation.
University of Lethbridge sociologist Trevor Harrison studies how Canadians and Americans view their armed forces and finds Canadians inching closer to their neighbours with what he calls a valorization of the military, especially at sporting events. He also says that, because of Canada's small population, the deaths of young soldiers become magnified.
