This article originally appeared in The Hub.
By J. L. Granatstein, January 6, 2026
Many years ago, I had a lot to do with the Canadian Officers’ Training Corps (COTC). I attended the Royal Military College as a Regular Officers’ Training Plan officer cadet, and I trained with COTC in the summers. Then, when I was commissioned, I worked with COTC officer cadets for two summers at Camp Borden, giving them infantry training through classroom lectures, weapons, fieldcraft, and section and platoon tactics. Most became as proficient as I, and some were probably better. (Since I was barely 22, some of the COTC cadets were also older and smarter!)
I don’t know what happened to each individual when my COTC cadets finished their training. A few likely joined the Regular Force, more joined Primary Reserve units, and many just became full-time civilians. But I am certain that all carried memories with them and an understanding of the military.
The COTC had begun at McGill University in 1912, expanded across the country during the Great War, continued through the interwar years, and then became compulsory for all undergraduate male students during the Second World War. In both conflicts, the COTC produced thousands of officers who helped lead our regiments, brigades and divisions and made them effective. After 1945, enrolment in the COTC dropped off, and in 1968, with defence funding scarce and the Vietnam War stirring anti-military attitudes across Canada’s campuses, the government cancelled the program.
This was a major mistake. It severed the links between the universities and the military and dissuaded graduates in arts, medicine, law, engineering, and other disciplines from thinking of joining the Regular and Reserve forces. In other words, killing the COTC—and the similar but smaller programs run by the Navy and the Air Force—cut the Army off from the men and women who were its potential future leaders.
Now the global situation has changed dramatically. Russia is aggressive again, China has become a threat, and rogue states like North Korea and Iran have nuclear weapons or are making them. The United States is dusting off the Monroe Doctrine with a new Trumpian twist, and the members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are only beginning to rearm. The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) are understrength and ill-equipped, and the Primary Reserves are but a shadow of their strengths before the world wars.
General Jennie Carignan, the chief of the defence staff (CDS), last year called for a new force of 300,000 in the Supplementary Reserve, a lightly trained army of civilians who could assist in civil and military emergencies. The Supplementary Reserve at present is a list of under 5,000 retired officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) who have indicated they would rejoin the CAF if needed.
This new Supplementary Reserve is intended to be very different. These men and women would receive some rudimentary training in shooting, communications, truck driving, and drone operation, and would do a maximum of five days of training a year in peacetime. Their role, the CDS stated, was to be available in crises ranging from “low-intensity natural disasters to high-intensity large-scale combat operations.”
It is highly unlikely that five days of training a year will provide members with what they would need to survive combat. But if there were regularly updated lists of skill sets and if contact is maintained with these men and women, they could be very useful, for example, in mobilizing firefighters and evacuations in civil emergencies. As General Carignan said, she could contemplate heavy equipment operators, cooks, and electricians being helpful in many circumstances. So could professionals such as doctors, lawyers, and engineers.
The CDS also indicated that she wanted to boost Primary Reserve strength to 100,000, a figure that would more than quadruple the Reserves and get Army units from a strength of one or two hundred men and women up to six or seven hundred. (The CAF is also aiming to raise its Regular Force strength by under 10 percent, unfortunately, an inadequate increase.)
The CDS’s plans for the Supplementary Reserve are necessary and welcome, but there are two important questions left unanswered: where will the funding come from, and where will its leaders be found? Money is always tight, but for the first time in decades, Canada has a government that is serious about defence, and Ottawa will find the funds.
But leaders need to be recruited and trained. A new tri-service Canadian Officers’ Training Corps could be a major part of the answer. Get the universities and colleges involved with the military again after six decades of absence. Sixty years ago, university students were overwhelmingly white males. Now the universities have more female students than men, and the students are multicultural—white, black, and brown—unlike the Regular and Reserve forces. A new COTC would link Canada’s military to the nation’s present and future population.
The time is right. Youth unemployment is high all across the country, over 14 percent in the autumn of 2025. Pay rates for the armed forces were increased last summer, and COTC cadets could expect to be relatively well paid at a time when their peers may be unemployed. That matters, but so too does the desire to serve Canada when there are threats from abroad and from climate change disasters such as fires and floods.
The COTC graduates would become the junior officers who could help to train the new Supplementary Reserve, a task the Regular forces, short-staffed as they are, could not easily do. As important, the COTC would provide a source of officer recruitment for the Primary Reserve units of the three services, something absolutely necessary if they are to expand as dramatically as the CDS desires.
To make the new COTC work, the CAF needs to ensure that its recruiting system begins to work properly at last. Long delays in paperwork and glacial security screening will drive away applicants. There needs to be training infrastructure at selected bases to handle enrolees for summer training, and small cadres established at the universities and colleges to offer classroom instruction during the academic year.
This will be difficult for the understrength Regular forces to handle, so some of the present officers and NCOs in nearby Primary Reserve units or on the present Supplementary Reserve list might be called out.
General Carignan’s plans provide the opportunity to do something important for Canada’s civil and military defence. They can connect the CAF to the next generation of leaders at a time when there are real threats to Canada’s people and territory. We can do this; we need to do this.
Historian J.L. Granatstein is a member of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Research Advisory Board. A bestselling author, Granatstein was the director and CEO of the Canadian War Museum.
