I continue to indulge myself in reviewing the Canadian Militia Lists from 1914. The world prior to the Canadian Expeditionary Force and the Canadian Corps.
A world where there was no Air Force, Space Force or Cyber Force.
A world where the Signals Corps was still trying to implement Morse Code and relied on semaphore flags and heliographs and the Aldis lamp had yet to be invented. Where the wireless telegraph was brand new.
It was also a world where Canada was trying to figure out what it was going to do now that the Royal Navy wasn't stopping at Halifax and Esquimalt. Did it need a navy? What sort of navy would that look like? Should it buy ships or those new-fangled submarines that Amor de Cosmos was agitating for on the West Coast? Or should it just contribute to the Royal Navy?
1910 to 2026 and I feel that that discussion is still unresolved.
It was also a world in which police forces were a novelty. In which there were no fire brigades. In which there were no emergency rooms or ambulances, and where hospitals and local doctors were few and far between.
It was a world of small communities, some of them very new, with poor communications both due to technology and infrastructure and due to all the languages of the Tower of Babel having been invited to take up residence in the las decade or so.
In my view the only central organizing principle available to these communities, both for self-help and for connection to the national government was the Militia.
The Militia was the local Disaster Response Team. If you were dealing with a seasonal flood or a grassfire, if you were dealing with lost kids or some unruly miners, if you were concerned about marauding Presbyterians, naked Doukhobors, raging Suffragettes or hostile natives, if you were dealing with an outbreak of cholera and needed to establish a quarantine, the answer in all cases was the same: Go grab the local Militia Captain and have him call out his Company. Officially or unofficially. They were local. They were available. They were organized.
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That old Militia was based on the ancient principle that every man was a member of the Militia. Whether he wanted to be there or not. Everybody was subject to being put under the authority of those local Captains and their Companies.
It was understood that not everybody was needed all the time and that it would be detrimental to the economy and society if everybody was in uniform and on the government payroll all the time. So the MIlitia was tiered.
Tasks were assessed and resource requirements determined and numbers of the Milita needed allocated.
Thus you had the Active Militia that were tasked and the Sedentary Militia that were untasked and continued on with their lives. The Sedentary Militia was the vast majority of society who spent their lives looking after their familiies and hoping that they were never called up for training let alone service.
But they were on their District Captain's rolls. He was required to keep track of all the Militia men in his district, Sedentary and Active, and determine which of four classes of candidates they currently belonged to - based on age, marital status, children, health and prior service.
Not everybody was a trained soldier but everyone was a potential soldier and a soldier was Her Majesty's Odd Job Man.
The Active Militia was that portion of the Militia, the male population, which had a command structure, which was trained, which was available and which was paid. Some were employed full time: The Permanent Active MIlitia. Some were only employed part time and were only employed when called out: The Non-Permanent Active Militia. They got paid for training time as well.
The Active Militia, Permanent and Non-Permanent was populated by the willing and the unwilling. Because everybody was liable to be called to the Active Militia from the Sedentary ranks it inevitably resulted in men being called up that didn't want to be there. Fortunately there were others that did want to be there, or at least wanted the money that came from being there. Those keeners were called Volunteers and their Volunteer Corps formed the backbone of the Permanent Active Militia. If a man was called up but didn't want to serve he could hire another man to take his place in the ranks.
This system generally worked despite high rates of desertion in the "Permanent" ranks.
The local community and the government both had connections to accessible labour pools with a command structure. The force could be tailored to task, purpose and need depending on circumstances, time available and budget.
The structure also bonded every male in the country to each other and to their government. It supplied a unifying structure for a young, growing and largely disconnected country. The annual training camp was one of the few opportunities where Ukes, Scandihoovians, Jocks, Micks, Taffs and Blacks met and got to know each other.
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Fast forward to our day.
My impression.
The population still exists.
The Militia still exists. But it is only a virtual force. It has expanded to include all the women who vote. But there is no organizing structure.
The District Captains are all gone.
Everbody is the Sedentary Militia but doesn't know it. They don't understand that they are all liable to call up.
Part of the reason for this is that not only have those Militia who didn't want to serve hired Volunteers to fill the ranks of the Permanent Active Militia to do their fighting, and other odd jobs, for them, but they have hired other Volunteers to do the other jobs required of the local companies.
We have hired Volunteers to be permanent police so we don't have to be police and upset our neighbours.
We have hired Volunteers to be firefighters, both permanent and non-permanent so we don't have to.
We have hired Volunteers to secure our convicts, secure our borders, guard our coasts, investigate our citizenry.
We have hired Volunteers to provide hospitals, emergency rooms, ambulances, doctors, nurses and medics.
We have hired Volunteers to provide the infrastructure for communications, transportation and energy.
In doing all of this hiring we have gained a lot of comfort and ease and security.
But we have lost.
We have lost a sense of personal responsibility. We have lost a sense of community. And we have lost a sense of being individually capable.
We have hired professionals.
And we are not worthy.
But God!. Are they expensive!
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I am with Adam Ferguson on the value of the Militia.
Adam Ferguson
(1723–1816), a key Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, strongly advocated for a citizen militia as essential for maintaining civic virtue, political freedom, and national security in a commercial society. He believed that relying solely on a professional standing army led to national apathy, weakness, and eventual despotism.
And concurrent with this debate the House of Commons in London was drawing these conclusions.
"In the spring of 1756 there was a great alarm over the possibility of a French invasion of England. Since there were only 35,000 regular soldiers stationed in Great Britain, and there was no militia, the government took the unusual measure of bringing over 8,600 Hanoverian and 6,500 Hessian soldiers at a cost of over £300,000 if they were sent home by Christmas, but much more if they stayed longer. The employment of foreign mercenary troops was not only an expensive measure, but one which some worried might become permanent, while many feared that it would be repeated every time that France threatened to invade. Many Englishmen felt ashamed that they needed to depend upon foreign auxiliaries for their defence. The Speaker of the House of Commons caught the tone of the nation in his address to the King: ‘Subsides to foreign princes, when already burdened by a debt scarce to be borne, cannot but be severely felt; an army of foreign troops, a thing unprecedented, unheard of, unknown, brought into England, cannot but alarm’. The time was ripe for reviving the militia: not as an alternative to the regular army, but as a supplement to it."
Adam Ferguson - March 2026
www.cambridge.org
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The background to the Scottish Militia debate was that the English didn't trust the Scots. A bunch of Teuchters in kilts and other rags had invaded England just 11 years previous and made it as far as Derby, a couple of days march from London, with bagpipes blairing. It didn't matter to the English that the Teuchters had been opposed by men in Redcoats from Ayr, Glasgow and Edinburgh at Culloden. As far as the English were concerned one Scot was as bad as another and far better that the only weapons in Scotland be in the hands of a standing force of government men. This offended the men of Edinburgh, like Ferguson, who had turned out to fight Charlie's Jacobite Teuchters and Tories.
They wanted to be treated like any other loyal Brit and be given the opportunity, like their English brothers, to defend the islands that they occupied together.
...
I argue strongly for the national institution of a well-regulated Militia, as an adjunct to the Standing Forces supplied by all our Permanent Paid Volunteers, because there is a need to unify.
And it is worth spending on that.
