Waiting to hear

I still haven’t heard from Canadian Forces Recruiting Group – I think they’re doing the background checks right now.  I just wish there was a way to speed it up without getting lax on the security controls.

Alberta’s military bases are getting a $40million upgrade which is splendid!  Aside from creating 200 jobs, CFB Edmonton is getting $21million for housing a training site.  CFB Wainwright is getting a water plant upgrade, and CFB Cold Lake is getting  upgrades to its infrastructure.  Harper says there’s going to be $400million of upgrades this year.  That remains to be seen – although I’m skeptical.  Even though Conservatives are traditionally pro-military, Canadian Conservatives are traditionally marginally less anti-military than most Canadians.

Permanent Residents of Canada can join the Canadian Forces

UPDATE – 6 Nov 2009:  The Canadian Forces eligibility requirements have been amended and the information in this blog post I wrote is no longer applicable / relevant. For recruiting information, please contact Canadian Forces Recruiting.

I had some great news last Monday.  I called the Canadian Forces Recruitment office in Winnipeg and was going to speak to the officer in charge of recruitment about the reasons why Permanent Residents of Canada couldn’t join the military.  In mid-sentence, Corporal Pohl sort of cut me off and said ‘that’s been changed’.

I could barely contain the excitement in my voice and told her I’d see her soon.  The next day I drove to Winnipeg to the office.  The feeling of stepping into that office finally with the right to apply for enlistment put me on top of the world.

Since I was a young boy I’ve wanted to be a soldier.  The moment that forever defined that desire was about 1993 during the Royal Tournament of which I was a member so I could get tickets.  They had the literature, brochures, pamphlets, and some examples of kit used by the British Army.  Ever since then I was hooked on the military!

In the Canadian Forces recruitment office I Read more...

Canada’s Military

It’s safe to assume that Canada produces some of the best military snipers in the world. The Canadian forces are competent… on par with the Yanks, but not as good as the Brits yet. The problem is the value that Canada places upon its military. Here’s a news story I picked up from a newspaper which made me very pissed off with Rick Hillier.

A former Nova Scotia man who was turned down when he tried to join the Canadian air force has won the Distinguished Flying Cross for demonstrating “great courage and composure” while piloting a British military helicopter in Afghanistan.

Flight Lieutenant Christopher Hasler grew up in Bedford, near Halifax, and learned how to fly gliders and Cessnas with the local air cadet squadron.

After job-shadowing a Sea King helicopter pilot at 12 Wing Shearwater and graduating high school, he turned his eye to the sky with the hope of making a career out of flying military choppers.

“I applied out of high school to the Canadian Forces and didn’t get in, for whatever reason,” the 26-year-old said during a Christmas visit with his parents, who live in Ottawa.

“These things happen. So I went to university and still really wanted to fly. So I gave the Royal Air Force a call and then I was successful.”

After a relatively peaceful stint in Iraq in 2004, Hasler was sent to Afghanistan last summer for a two-month tour.

He was the captain of a Chinook on July 17 when he led a group of helicopters into Sangin, a Taliban stronghold where a soldier had been killed the day before while trying to secure the landing site.

The mission was to bring desperately needed supplies to British paratroopers.

The citation says that “he held his nerve while his troops were disembarking at the hottest of helicopter landing sites, allowing them to suppress enemy positions with minimum U.K. casualties.

Hasler, who did another two-month tour of Afghanistan in the fall is to return again early in the new year, plans to attend a ceremony at Buckingham Palace in the spring, when Queen Elizabeth II will present him with the DFC.

This makes me twice as mad because those in Canadian Forces Recruiting turned down my application because I’m not a Canadian citizen. HOW STUPID CAN THE TOFFS IN BUSINESS SUITS GET? The Canadians are bearing the brunt of the Taliban in the south of Afghanistan… Canadian soldiers are dying, yet they won’t send more soldiers or boost the national spending on defence.

Of course… Italy, France and Germany are still a bunch of pussy whipped bunch of pansies who are a disgrace to NATO, by keeping their sorry ass troops up north, and refusing to put them in danger down the south while Canada, Britain, Denmark and the U.S are taking all the crap.