ADAMS: Napoleon Led from the Front, Our Leaders Lead from the Couch
I remember, as a young teenager, being aware that my member of Parliament existed. He was a distant figure who sent flyers about community grants and posed with seniors at legion halls. The idea that Erin O'Toole might one day ask me—or any young Canadian—to strap on body armour and serve a mandatory term in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) would have seemed preposterous. Today, thanks to a growing chorus of retired generals, pundits, and concerned editorialists, that preposterous idea is creeping toward respectability.
The case for mandatory national service, most notably articulated by retired lieutenant-general Michel Maisonneuve in Maclean's, sounds reasonable enough. Canada can't defend its Arctic sovereignty. Our military is understaffed. Young people lack patriotism. A year of service—military or otherwise—would instill discipline and prepare us for a dangerous world.
On paper, I actually agree with parts of this.
A national service program that matches young Canadians with firefighting crews, coast guard search-and-rescue teams, or healthcare support in underserved communities could be genuinely progressive. It would allow young people see the country, develop real skills, and contribute to urgent needs, like the hundreds of thousands of healthcare workers our country will be short of by 2030. Done right, it could build the kind of national connectedness that doesn't require a war scare to manufacture.
But that's not the conversation we're having. The conversation we're having, framed by headlines and viral declarations that "war is coming," is about conscription. It's about preparing young Canadians emotionally and legally for the possibility that they will be ordered to kill and be killed on behalf of a country whose political class has spent decades letting our military atrophy.
And this brings me to a question nobody in this debate wants to answer.
When King Richard rode to battle, he didn't send others ahead while he reviewed the troops from a safe distance. His Majesty mounted his horse and charged first. When Napoleon Bonaparte, the architect of the modern merit-based legal systems we still use today, marched his armies across Europe, he was there. He froze with them in Russia. He breathed the same cannon smoke. He believed so completely in the system he built—that rules apply equally, that merit matters more than birth—that he proved it with his presence on the battlefield.
Now ask yourself: In 2026, would any Canadian political leader, do the same?
Would Dominic Cardy, who publicly asks 18-year-olds to strap on body armour, pick up an assault rifle, and stand on the front lines of whatever "necessary war" we're supposedly preparing for? Would Prime Minister Mark Carney serve alongside the working-class kids from Regina and Trois-Rivières? Would the children of our media class, who write those urgent editorials about national sacrifice, find themselves in the same barracks as the teenagers who can't afford to dodge the draft through family connections or medical exemptions?
We all know the answer. And that's the problem.
The fatalistic messaging we're hearing—that war is inevitable, that Europe is already mobilizing, that Canada must "prepare psychologically" for conscription—is not an argument about defence policy. It's a technique for manufacturing consent.
As the editorial board here at The Provincial Times put it many months ago, you don't soften the public for conscription by announcing conscription, you soften them by convincing them the alternative is doom. You treat war like weather, something that happens to us, rather than the result of specific political decisions, diplomatic failures, and choices made by leaders who face no personal consequences for getting them wrong.
Countries bordering active conflict zones, with different histories, different alliances, and different immediate threats, may have legitimate reasons to discuss conscription. Importing those debates here, without acknowledging our fundamentally different reality, is intellectually lazy at best and emotionally manipulative at worst.
Most Canadians aren't wondering which neighbour might cross their border; they're wondering whether they'll ever afford a home, whether their local hospital will stay open, and why the political class that neglected the needs of our country for decades now expects teenagers to sacrifice for it.
If national service is truly about building a better, more connected country—about fighting fires, saving lives at sea, and teaching young Canadians what this vast land looks like beyond their own provinces—then let's have that conversation. Let's build a program that actually addresses the crises we face: our inability to respond to catastrophic wildfires, and our shortage of healthcare workers, our overstretched emergency services.
But let's stop pretending that this conversation is about anything other than what it increasingly appears to be: an attempt to normalize the idea that young Canadians owe their lives to a political class that would never dream of risking its own.
The Napoleonic Code standardized a golden rule: the rules must apply equally, or they do not apply at all. If national service comes, let it come with the understanding that every politician's son, every pundit's daughter, and every CEO's nephew will stand shoulder-to-shoulder with everyone else. And if war is truly on the table, let the people who put it there prove they believe what they preach by riding the first horse.
This piece was written by an individual contributor and reflects the editorial position of The Provincial Times and Left Lane Media Group. Read our Content Policy here.
