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The Snowbirds Are Retiring. So Is the Military’s Connection to Public Life

For millions of Canadians, those red-and-white jets were their only encounter with the armed forces

After fifty-five years and more than 2,700 displays for over 140 million people, the 431 Air Demonstration Squadron will fly its last season in the CT-114 Tutor in 2026. A replacement aircraft has been chosen, the CT-157 Siskin II, and the new team is expected to be operational in the early 2030s. In the meantime, the squadron stands down.

A lot of Canadians will be disappointed. That reaction is completely understandable. The Snowbirds are one of the most recognizable symbols of the Canadian Armed Forces. They have performed at air shows across North America every summer for more than five decades. For most Canadians, watching those red-and-white jets fly in formation overhead has been their most direct, personal encounter with the military. Now, that fixture is going away for the better part of a decade.

The aircraft decision itself is defensible. The Tutors have been flying for over sixty years and were overdue for retirement. A 2003 Department of National Defence study recommended immediate replacement to have new aircraft in service by 2010. Better late than never.

But there is a question the announcement leaves unanswered: When the CAF’s most visible public presence disappears from summer skies, what replaces it? And does the CAF understand what it is losing? The Snowbirds are not just an air show act. For most Canadians, they are the only direct encounter with their military they will ever have.

I ask because I have spent a significant part of my career working on exactly this relationship; as a former provincial chair of the Canadian Forces Liaison Council, my mandate was to increase employer support for military reservists. Reservists are part-time soldiers who hold civilian jobs, and their ability to deploy, train, and serve depends directly on whether their employers understand and value what they do.

One of the most effective tools we had was the Executrek. We took civilian employers out into the field and put them directly in front of their reservist employees at work: drills, demonstrations, live fire exercises. The effect was consistent and significant. Employers who arrived with limited understanding of what their employees actually did on their days off left with a fundamentally different view. They saw the precision, the discipline, the technical skill, and the leadership that military training produces. Disinterested employers became engaged ones. Supportive in ways they had not been before: more willing to grant the time off required for training and deployment, more aware of the skills the CAF was developing in people who then brought those skills back to their civilian workplaces.

The lesson was straightforward. Exposure changed everything. An employer who had never seen a reservist at work had no basis for valuing what that person did. An employer who had stood on a training ground and watched did. The Snowbirds operate on the same principle at a much larger scale.

Canadians like their military. They just do not think about joining it. That gap is a problem.

Canadians trust the Canadian Armed Forces more than any other institution in the country. A Leger survey released on Remembrance Day 2025 put that trust at 75 percent, ahead of police, the courts, and the federal government. Three-quarters of Canadians say the CAF makes them proud. A Nanos poll from March 2026 found that willingness to serve full-time in a major conflict had doubled in four months, from 12 to 24 percent, as the security environment became more pressing.

By any measure, this is a population that respects and values its military. And yet, the same Nanos poll found that only 33 percent of Canadians see a military career as a good option for young people today.

That gap, between high trust and low career consideration, needs to be addressed. Most Canadians value the institution deeply. Very few think of it as somewhere they or their children might work. Pride does not automatically become enlistment. Something has to connect the two,........

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