Every summer, Canada’s universities and the Canadian Army Reserve confront opposite versions of the same problem. Thousands of young citizens make themselves available for military service just as universities enter the most flexible part of their operating year. The Army must find places in which to house, feed, and teach them, while residences, classrooms, and dining facilities on many campuses operate below their regular academic-year demand. Canada has treated one as a military problem and the other as a matter of campus scheduling, although together they suggest a practical answer to a pressing defence need.
The Army Reserve depends upon citizens who surrender time taken from studies, careers, and families in order to serve. A student reservist does not offer the country an abstract expression of goodwill. That student reorganizes a degree, gives up civilian earnings, and accepts military obligations that classmates do not carry. Yet willingness cannot produce a trained soldier unless it meets a system capable of carrying the volunteer through a complete course. When a place is unavailable, a missed summer can postpone qualification and the opportunities that follow from it. What begins as a personal disappointment, repeated across units and years, becomes a national failure of force generation.
That failure belongs to a larger bottleneck. In its 2025 audit of Regular Force recruitment, the Auditor General reported almost 192,000 applicants between April 2022 and March 2025, with approximately 15,000 recruited during that period. Planned basic training capacity fell below external recruiting targets in all three years examined. The CAF has since increased enrolment and modernized recruitment, but recruitment brings a person only to the entrance of the training system. The same distinction appears in the Primary Reserve, whose total strength stood at 33,315 against a target of 38,800 as of July 31, 2026, while Average Paid Strength stood at 25,661 against an authorized level of 30,000. Canada needs more people in uniform, but the number that ultimately matters is the number trained, active, and available for employment.
Part of the difficulty lies in the narrow place where Canada has been taught to look for defence capacity. The CAF must own military capability, but it need not own every bed, kitchen, classroom, or administrative service upon which that capability depends. Those resources already exist across public institutions built for other purposes, and universities offer an unusually promising place to begin because they routinely sustain large temporary populations. Their annual rhythm also aligns with the Army Reserve. The Army offers eligible student reservists full-time employment from May to September, when many campuses retain some accommodation, teaching, and dining capacity beyond their summer academic and conference commitments. No campus should be presumed empty, and usable capacity must be verified institution by institution, but the national overlap is too substantial to ignore.
Canada should therefore establish Canadian University Reserve Training Nodes, beginning with a controlled pilot. A node would be neither a military base nor a campus regiment, but civilian support for an Army-controlled training activity. A participating university might provide accommodation, meals, classrooms, fitness facilities, technology, and local coordination. The Army would retain command, instruction, assessment, discipline, equipment, and qualification, while weapons custody, tactical field training, controlled stores, and secure communications would remain at suitable military establishments. Clear boundaries would make cooperation possible. Participation would be voluntary, academic freedom would remain intact, DND would pay the full cost of the services it purchased, and the university would remain civilian while the Army controlled everything that made the activity military.
Yet a busy campus is not, by itself, evidence of increased military capacity. The proper measure of a node is the course-complete seat, meaning an approved training place for which instructors, equipment, medical support, transportation, and access to ranges have all been secured. Two hundred available beds create only forty training places when the instructor cadre can train forty candidates, and only thirty when the required range can receive thirty. Cost must be judged with the same honesty. A node that merely draws instructors, equipment, and candidates away from an existing course has added nothing, while an inexpensive residence contract is no bargain if transportation and duplicated support make the completed activity more costly. A node deserves to continue only when it produces additional qualifications, improves candidate progression, releases scarce military infrastructure for another use, or preserves an expansion option worth its annual cost.
That final benefit gives the proposal significance beyond a single summer course. Canada’s new vision for the Reserve Force calls for a stronger operational Reserve and for the ability to mobilize Canadian institutions when demand exceeds the standing CAF. Mobilization cannot begin with officials searching for vacant buildings after an emergency has arrived, because a building becomes national capacity only when authority is settled, services are priced, suppliers are known, and people and equipment can be moved through it. Annual Reserve training would give those arrangements a peacetime purpose and test them repeatedly through reception, accommodation, feeding, transportation, communications, and contracting. The result would not itself constitute mobilization capacity, nor would it replace military infrastructure. It would, however, preserve one working part of the machinery through which additional recruits and reservists could be received, sustained, and trained. Under strategic warning, Canada would possess something better than a catalogue of possible locations. It would possess a system that had worked before.
The Army now has a practical opening in which to test the proposition. In April 2026, it centralized its four divisional training centres under the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre, creating a national structure within which university nodes could be developed as additional locations and civilian support packages. The first step need not be grand. One suitable university, one validated Army training requirement, and one live activity would be enough to establish the true cost, determine whether output increased and expose the practical obstacles before any wider expansion. If the node adds no course-complete seats, it should end. If it works, the Army would possess a tested standard that could be adapted in other regions.
The deeper case, however, rests with the citizens who have already stepped forward. Canada cannot reasonably ask young people to arrange their studies, civilian work, and family lives around military service while the country’s other institutions remain politely uninvolved. Universities need not become military institutions in order to accept a practical share of responsibility for the society that sustains them. They need only offer, on clear terms and at full cost, the ordinary things they already know how to provide, while allowing the Army to do what only the Army can do.
Beds, meals, and classrooms may seem too prosaic to belong in a discussion of national preparedness, yet durable national capacity is usually built from ordinary things made dependable before they are urgently needed. Young Canadians are already volunteering to serve. Canada’s universities should be ready to serve beside them.
About the author. Dr. John Walsh is Director of Defence and Industrial Strategy at the University of Guelph and an Associate Professor of Classics. He co-founded the University’s Serving Scholar Program and works on universities, defence, force generation and civil-military cooperation.
The views expressed in this op-ed are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of the Institute or its staff.
Photo: Aviator (Avr) Daniel Bartchouk, Imagery Technician, Canadian Armed Forces. Department of National Defence / Combat Camera / 2026. Crown Copyright. The use of this image does not imply or constitute endorsement by the Department of National Defence or the Canadian Armed Forces.
