He didn’t have to, nor did he succeed; the only people he “convinced” were the ones who wanted to be convinced. He just felt the need to go though the motions, something Trump doesn’t.
In a few months, media personalities will be saying it. This is part of their plan.
It’s also not really of any use. Conscription made some sense when we had space and time to train troops to be send to Europe as large formations in the Allied army.
The use is to convince your potential adversary that you are serious about staying in business.
Mexico has conscription. One year, five hours a day. It’s easy to ridicule, but it sends a message. Trump is threatening them with tariffs, but not with an end to their national existence.
I get that Canada doesn’t do peacetime conscription. But look at the title of this thread. A draft is impossible now, yes. But if Trump keeps it up, this is just the start of a big jump in nationalism:
I think any conversation about conscription needs buy-in from the youth who would be conscripted, not those of us who are too old. Though personally I’d happily give up a few days a month for national service of some sort, as long as it’s non-violent.
Offer a short course of voluntary basic military training – civil defense – to people of any age who can pass a basic physical, and auxiliary training for those who can’t, and publicize how many show up?
That, of course, is presuming that enough would show up to make a significant show. I’d think that it would be worth a try.
It’s more than no peacetime conscription.
Wartime conscription almost tore the country apart in WWI. More restrained handling of the issue kept it bubbling under the surface in WWII.
As @mnemosyne says, it would likely be political suicide in Quebec.
Support for Canada ≠ support for conscription.
The tariffs are by purpose designed to hurt Americans AND Canadians AND Mexicans. He needs ALL of them to suffer hardships that, in time, drive them to violence.
Those conditions guarantee the US can dominate/seize all of North America.
This boy wants to rule the world, and y’all handed him keys to the treasury and the most powerful military in the world.
The whole world is about suffer terribly all due to the profound ignorance of the American voter.
I just saw the orange one claiming Canada relies on the US for protection and defence. But Canada’s defence needs differ, mostly because we aren’t romping around the world making enemies.
Besides, in the end, it turns out, it’s our friends we need protection from, yikes!
If Canada is willing to payfor it, you’d get more than enough people willing to be a secondary reserve force. We’d struggle to provide them with weapons adn equipment, to be honest; that takes time to spool up. Canada manufactures all its own small arms, for instance, but you can’t just go to them and say “oh by the way, we need another 50,000 C7s, a few thousand C9s…” They have their production planned years in advance. They rely on suppliers who are themselves not able to just make parts materialize. I’ve been in these factories. They are not big; this is precision work, done on expensive machines by trained machinists.
Full reservists would be way better soldiers but are harder to recruit because it’s a larger commitment; entire summers, a day every week, a weekend or two every week, and they’re hitting full usefulness as a soldier only after a year or two. Reservists aren’t cheap and that’s even more money. This will require real commitment.
But can you get volunteers? You sure would now! Especially if you’re willing to pay and to get serious about recruitment. Lots of students would be willing to be reservists; it’s a great summer job if nothing else.
The other issue we face is mobilization. It’s fine to have reservists but if you can’t roll 'em out fast, they cannot help.
There’s an old quote from some Soviet leader, “The capitalists will sell us the rope we use to hang them.”
The US has hundreds of millions of guns. Just have the volunteers go to any gun show, and make an offer on something that chambers the correct round. Maybe have a few approved rounds, just in case. Pretend we’re doing this to offset some of that trade deficit!
And since Canada controls the border going back, the US won’t even know the guns are leaving!
NATO 5.56. Fairly common. But you mean this plan in jest, yes?
If you wanna train people, you need commonality. Training soldiers is hard, and it requires consistency of approach. Everyone needs to be on the same page and know how to use the same kit.
Not really. If the US decides to be serious about this, we’re talking about an existential threat to Canada as we know it. Uniformity is a nice thing to have, but not at the cost of not having enough soon enough. Sure, ramp up production, and gradually replace a hodge-podge of weapons with a standard one, but get some guns out there quickly.
I had kind of hoped it was in jest, too.
Organizing thousands, much less tens of thousands of people to each go to separate gun shows, each purchase a gun independently, and then go back home across a border?
That’s a logistical nightmare and several public shooting incidents waiting to happen, even ignoring the non-negligible number of psychologically unstable people who would be part of this plan. Herding cats would be vastly easier.
We’re going to have to recruit and train those people anyways, so we’re already looking at a huge administrative burden. The gun supply is just one more factor there, but it’s one we can solve with cash, in the short term.
Let’s say we have 10,000 weapons available. We use those 10,000 to train the first 10,000 volunteers. Let’s say 8,000 pass, the rest are deemed unfit, for whatever reason. After they’re trained, you tell those 8,000 to go buy a gun, while you start training the next 10,000 people with those original 10,000 guns. Wash, rinse, repeat as often as possible. Having them buy guns after training will likely weed out the worst of those problems. We could eliminate more by following Switzerland’s example: Don’t keep the guns at home. Establish mini armouries in as many neighbourhoods as possible, and then have the volunteers pick them up only when we determine an invasion is imminent.
I get the idea, but I’m saying it’s not workable.
Expecting 8000 people (or even 100 people, really - even trained people) to each independently carry out a moderately complex task in concert without incident and with little to no guidance or oversight during execution is, if not impossible, then wildly unlikely. Now, if they already owned the guns themselves for whatever reason, then that’s the difficult part already done.
If you managed it, it would be an accomplishment rarely paralleled in human history and you would rightly be considered a literal genius in organization, training, and logistics.
There are good reasons why we expect and train for the opposite in an organized military. Guerilla independently act but not in concert. And regular military don’t independently execute plans - they have officers and chains of command in place for that…
It’d make a lot more sense to just procure a bunch of some other nation’s 5.56mm NATO-chambered service rifle, if we can’t produce enough of our won. Turkey must be able to fill pretty large rifle orders, for example, given the size of their standing army.
It would be pretty funny to suddenly start ordering masses of materiel from US arms manufacturers, though. Or maybe even surplus. Hey Uncle Sam, we’d like to buy a thousand of those M1A1’s you have parked in the desert! Why? Oh, just concerned about supporting our guys in Latvia, nothing you need to worry about.
“Warm bodies with guns” won’t help all that much anyway; “more bodies” hasn’t worked well since at least WWI. You need nukes, or guerilla fighters - who will be mostly using bombs, not guns.
In a sensible world, yeah. But if we’re doing this, it’s because we really think the US is likely to invade us. In that world, any such purchase would be subject to US sanctions, and possibly even interdiction if they can figure out how and when it’s being shipped to Canada.
I really don’t think having individuals buying their own guns would be that big a logistical issue. People buying stuff is fundamental to capitalism. Looking around, the US sells about 40-50,000 cars per day. 8000 guns spread out over a few days or weeks would just be a blip.
And we already have systems in place to reimburse expenses for government employees, so we can just leverage that. Or just add a line item to the income tax form, allowing the people to deduct the full cost of the gun from their taxes owing that year. CRA is already set up to process those kinds of things, it just adds one more item.
Taiwan has a four month conscription period. Do some commentators say it is insufficient? Yes. But so far, the PRC is deterred.
I think DJT is a bully who will shy away from what risks becoming a real fight.