The Ben Mulroney Show - Should every Canadian have to serve in the military?

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

Mike Burns, Executive Chair of Canada's Valour Games, joins Ben to discuss the need for a National Service Program for young Canadian. Engage Canada is advancing the case for a modern, voluntary, competitive, structured and paid national youth service program for Canadians aged 18 to 25. Some believe this should be mandatory. If you enjoyed the podcast, tell a friend! For more of the Ben Mulroney Show, subscribe to the podcast! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://link.chtbl.com/bms⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Also, on youtube -- ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@BenMulroneyShow⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Ben on Twitter/X at https://x.com/BenMulroney Insta: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠@benmulroneyshow⁠⁠⁠   Executive Producer:  Mike Drolet Reach out to Mike with story ideas or tips at [e-mail] Enjoy   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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They brought an excitement around a sport that for a lot of Canadians was new. and this could be the beginning of an ascension. This could be Canada's Carter effect for soccer. So we have to wait to see. But in the meantime, I think it needs to be said. Toronto and Vancouver were tremendous host cities. It'll be a while now to see if the financial burden that was placed on those cities will pay off long term. but the feeling in Toronto, at least from this one person's perspective,

is that it felt special being here. It felt like this was one of the destinations in the world that the people were paying attention to. And on that note, I think it was a good investment. But we'll have to wait and see. I want to start the show. By the way, happy Monday, everybody. I want to start the show with a uniquely Canadian story. It's from North Bay.

family opened their pool for what the six weeks that you can have your pool open in North Bay and they heard some commotion heard some commotion in the backyard and at first the owner of the house paid it no mind because as he said he thought it might have just been a black bear because they typically he's had one in the past making noise and he didn't really worry about it it wasn't a black bear it was a moose There was a moose on the loose in his backyard. I was stuck in the pool. And it took a while for it to get out and he got stuck in the backyard.

And the backyards are sort of like a almost like jenga pieces of other backyard upon backyard. And eventually after getting lost in his backyard and ending up in somebody else's pool, the moose was eventually freed. But I do want to just point out that this gentleman in his backyard had at one point this summer, had a black bear and a moose. And if that's not the most Canadian story of the day, I don't know what is. One story that I hope becomes more common in this country that we are very proud to talk about is when Canadians invest in themselves and when Canadians believe in this country enough to invest in it.

And there was an announcement today on a call to create a... a national service program for young Canadians. And this is not a new idea, and it's certainly not new amongst something is a best practice in a lot of countries. But we have a shot. If this is something that we can do, we have a shot to do it right,

and we have a shot to do something that will have positive knock-on effects, not just for the people in it, but for the country more generally. And so to talk about it, we're here with Canada's Valor Games, Mike Burns. Mike, welcome to the show. Hey, good to be back with you, Ben.

So what are we talking about here? What is this national service program? Yeah, we launched today officially engaged Canada. It's a group of about 14 of us that have been working over the past year or so on figuring out whether or not there is an opportunity for us to launch a national service program for young people between the ages of 18 to 25. to give them meaningful work that would be paid, that would be structured,

give them experiences that perhaps they wouldn't be able to get at that age and at that time, and not necessarily in the community or city that they're living in. Perhaps they could be traveling out west or out east or working in the Arctic for the country. And so as we looked at what that might look like for Canada, we realized early on,

early on that there are more than 60 countries around the world that have some form of national service for their young people. So there's lots of examples out there that we can learn from, that we can adopt to the Canadian context, and really not just help those that are going through the program and giving them the new skills, the residencies and the experience that they need as they move forward with their lives, but also align those jobs and those opportunities with some of the national priority. that we have as a country. And obviously our prime minister over the last year and a half has talked about building back Canada,

investing in infrastructure and other things. We really see this as a major investment in human capital that's going to go alongside that investment in new infrastructure across the country. So how fleshed out is this idea? Because as you explained it to me, so questions, concerns, and other things start popping in my head.

Like, is this, I mean, because in its worst incarnation, this could just be another bloated government program. And so are you envisioning like a clearinghouse that links businesses that might fit a criteria as, okay, the country needs these 10 things. And then businesses come on board and say, we think we check eight or nine of those boxes. and then people go through the system and it's like a job placement program? Yeah, so let me sort of step back a little bit.

We've sort of taken the approach that, first of all, that this program, whatever program we set up needs to be voluntary, that we're not, you know, taking people into national service that don't want to participate. We also believe that they should be properly compensated for their time and that it should be structured and suited to addressing some of Canadian Canada's needs. Mike, before we go on, why not make it mandatory? Like, if you're going to pay, so it's not like you're asking people to sacrifice. There are tons of countries out there that do national services.

Some of them have compulsory military service, literally putting everybody at risk. So this isn't even that. Why wouldn't we? And it's just a question. Why wouldn't we consider making it mandatory? Yeah, I can tell you right now that our group wrestled with this one very early on. There was a lot of strong opinions on both sides, whether it should be mandatory or voluntary. The reality is that when you start to look at designing a program for the country, it's just not practical.

What I mean by that is that there are about three million Canadians between the ages of 18 and 25. There is no way that you're going to be able to stand up a program in, in any amount of time that's going to accommodate hundreds of thousands of young people in any given year to be able to do that. In fact, if you looked at some of the best programs in the world, and we've done a lot of work looking at the Baltic nations, as well as the Nordic nations, in particular Norway and Finland, they absorb about 20% of their young people that go through this program. So if I think about 18-year-olds in Canada, there's about 400,000. every year, if we were able to get 20% of them at some point in time between the ages of 18 and 25,

you could be putting through roughly 80,000 Canadians through this program. That's a significant number of people that would be coming out of national service, new skills and experiences, resiliency, and a willingness to want to be part of something that's bigger than themselves. So I understand the argument for wanting to make this mandatory. question is, how do you create that number of spots for that number of people and be able to afford it? The reality is you can have a very successful program with a much smaller number of people volunteering. Okay, I'm going to start my question now. We're not going to get fully through the answer. So I might ask you to stick a pin on it. We'll continue it in the next segment.

Let's talk a practical scenario. I've got two sons. They are 16. When they graduate high school, they will be just shy of 18 prime candidates for something like this. In an ideal situation, if you could create this program yourself right now, what would a year of service look like for my sons? Yeah, I think a year of service for anybody, whether they're, you know, 18 to 25 is going to be, it's going to be meaningful work. It's going to be an opportunity for them to have a shared experience with other Canadians across the country and we're advocating that there is some form of basic military training to

start the program. So that may run for a number of weeks. But then after that, they would have a choice in determining what stream of work they would like to participate in. Some may want to carry on and stay in that military stream, but others would have a broad range of options. And that could be working and helping with elder care. It could be with disaster relief preparedness.