I joined Canada’s army in 1984, when I was 18 years old. As a kid who’d loved Star Trek, the military seemed like the next best thing to Starfleet. I needed a summer job after my first year of university, so I joined the army reserve, where I grew to love solving problems, working in teams and leading people. But when it came time to look at enlisting in the regular force, the long-term commitment gave me pause. I spent a long time reading the nine-year contract. Nine years was half of the life I’d known. What finally got me to sign was the mice type in the contract, revealing that if I wanted, I could leave after three years. That still felt like a long time, but I’d been accomplishing very little as a university student on a starvation budget. I could do three years.

I’ve been reflecting on that experience a lot lately, and what it reveals about the state of Canada’s military in 2025. Like me, a lot of Canadians have also been thinking about defence, which is not something we often do outside of wartime. But with world events turning increasingly fractious, we’re feeling more vulnerable than we have in a generation. More than a million Ukrainian-Canadians are worried about their families, who are under assault by Russia. Our own land is under threat for the first time in 200 years, including our Arctic territories, which are being sized up by Russia, China and even our closest ally. The U.S. president has spoken openly of erasing our borders.

As national defence has returned to the forefront of the national conversation, so has the state of our military—an institution Canadians remain proud of, even if we’ve allowed it to decline to a point where it can no longer stand on guard for us. Our warships need replacement. Our fighter jets are 40 years old, effective only against foes whose planes are even older. The roughly 2,000 Canadian soldiers stationed in Eastern Europe to deter Russian aggression can’t defend themselves from air attacks. These problems aren’t new. When I joined up in 1984, I was issued a Browning pistol made in Toronto at the end of the Second World War. Its aim was so inaccurate that I joked a bayonet would double its effective range. Today, half of our........

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