Why Does Ottawa Want to Undertake A Massive Expansion of Canada's Military Reserve?
🇨🇦 🇺🇸 | Commentary
Note: The following text was originally posted on my 𝕏/Twitter account. The original post may be expanded upon and edited for grammar and style in this post. Link
Originally posted on 11 December 2025
No one in Ottawa appears to be willing to go on record characterizing the reported planned build-up of a military reserve of 400,000 personnel—85,000 regulars + 100,000 military reservists + 300,000 supplemental “citizen” reservists—as being motivated, if only in part, by Trump and the United States under Trump 2.0, but it is otherwise difficult to explain the rationale behind such a move, which will likely cost billions in baseline overhead expenses (i.e., uniforms, personal equipment, admin/payroll, facilities upgrades, etc.) even without procuring lots of heavy/expensive military equipment for hundreds of thousands of additional military personnel.
One does not need people in military uniforms, armed or otherwise, to undertake disaster response roles. The reported numbers are also difficult to explain. A full-time national disaster response force, plus paid/unpaid volunteer units at the federal and provincial levels, makes more sense, even if these are thrown under the Department of National Defence budget as part of the creative accounting exercises that most NATO countries are undertaking to meet the second Trump administration’s spending targets for NATO. There is a case for a backstop to the Canadian Forces (regulars), RCMP, and provincial police forces in terms of the aid to the civil power role, but that is a topic that will likely be as, if not more, contentious as publicly characterizing the planned expansion of Canada’s military reserves as being motivated by the increasingly too-high-to-do-nothing—albeit still very low—threat of an American invasion.
As hedging approaches go, there is a certain appeal to expanding the military reserves in this manner. It will not make Canada much harder to invade and occupy, but it will make any such American decision have a higher human toll—albeit likely more in terms of greater Canadian casualties than American casualties, unless the planned new reservists get suitable training and equipment, which will entail an approach of a very different character and require much larger budgetary allocations that will be impossible to hide.
All things considered, the mental/conceptual model of the approaches to “total defence” undertaken by the likes of Finland, Sweden, Singapore, etc.—which the Canadian Forces have reportedly been studying for reasons beyond a potential American invasion—do not apply to Canada. The interplay of Canada’s human and physical geography with America’s immense military capabilities does not afford Canada such options in the unlikely event of an American invasion. Canada’s elected leaders evidently feel that they have to do something across the board in terms of national defence, including deviating from their longstanding procurement plans, and this appears to be resulting in some short-term thinking. One hopes that decision-makers in Ottawa realize that if an American invasion does come to pass, the nobility of “going down with a fight” will likely come with a hefty human price tag expressed in terms of corpses and mangled bodies, as well as physical destruction across Canada.
Canada is not the only NATO country to find itself in the—with respect to recent history—unfamiliar and very uncomfortable position of having to view the United States as a potential, if not an actual, adversary, and, as such, deal with the threat of invasion. Denmark is the other. Denmark confronts an unwanted reality in which it needs the United States and military cooperation with the United States via NATO to secure itself and European NATO countries against Russia, even as it faces the prospect of American territorial aggrandizement in Greenland. Denmark is hedging and selectively engaging with the United States where possible and as and when required.
Neither Canada nor Denmark have good “outside options,” unless their leaders are willing to fly to Moscow and/or Beijing seeking protection. Denmark is in a better position in terms of geographical distance from the US in terms of core Danish territory—where most of its population lives, which is not Greenland, membership in the European Union, and proximity to European NATO countries. Canada must, in effect, go it alone. Unlike Denmark, which is increasingly discussing the unfortunate new reality in public, Canada’s policy response is being made behind closed doors without any semblance of a public debate, even in Parliament. These are fateful decisions for Canada to make.