The Ben Mulroney Show - Unmarried Armed Forces Member Demands Marriage Counselling

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

On today's episode of "The Ben Mulroney Show," Ben is at his wits' end after an unmarried member of our armed forces demands the military provide marriage counselling. 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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Let your morning change you. Discover coffee plus on espresso.com. Greetings from Montreal. Thank you all for joining us here on the show today. Let me tell you what landed in my inbox this morning. Blacklock's reporter, which covers Ottawa the way nobody else, ever bothers to add a story today. And the Canadian Armed Forces is headed to a federal human rights tribunal hearing.

Now, the complaint comes from a member of the forces who identifies as LGBTQ. She asked the military for marriage counseling. And the military said no, because, wait for it, she's not married. So she filed a complaint under the Canadian Human Rights Act. And her argument, as Black Locks reporter says, is, and I'm quoting, quote, members of the LGBTQ community have more difficulty forming local relationships, and they may turn to online relationships. So read that again.

An unmarried member of our armed forces wants the military to provide marriage counseling. And the reason the rule should bend for her, in her own words, is that being LGBTQ makes it harder to meet people where you're posted. The Canadian Human Rights Commission looked at that and decided it deserved a full tribunal hearing. We're talking lawyers. We're talking witnesses. We're talking government time. And most importantly, we're talking about your money being spent.

Now, I've been keeping a file for a while now. And I like to call it, the world is laughing at us. And every few weeks, something new goes in it. This is at the top of the heat. Because here is where the Canadian military sits right now in the eyes of the world. At the start of September, the American Secretary of Defense, I'm sorry, the Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth posted a picture of a young Canadian cadet receiving an award from an instructor. And his caption was three words in the flag, this is real. He was mocking us.

Our defense minister, David McGinty, said it was, quote, below the dignity of the office. And he was right. And by the way, I posted to that effect, I was standing shoulder to shoulder with David McGinty on that. It was cheap. It was a shot at a kid. It was a shot at somebody's body appearance. It was beneath him. But notice what Hegset was betting on. He was betting the world would look at that picture and nod that the reputation we have is one to live down. And the way you do that is you live down a reputation by being so serious, so disciplined, so obviously capable that the joke loses context and stops landing. You do not live it down by spending the fall of 2026 in front of a tribunal arguing about who qualifies for marriage counseling.

Now, time to give the government it's due because the facts support it. Mark Carney has moved on structural problems. Canada spent 2% of GDP on defense in 2025 for the first time since the Cold War, and NATO confirmed that in March. He's committed to 5% by 2035. He announced a pay raise that the government itself calls historic 20% for privates, 13% for everyone up to Lieutenant Colonel retroactive to April of last year. He stood up a defense investment agency to pull per currant.

procurement out of the mud. And the one number that matters most is finally moving. The forces brought in more than 7,300 new regular force members last year, the highest in 30 years. Applications are up 62 percent. Good. Credit has been earned. But that's the plumbing. Money, pay, procurement. You need plumbing. You also need a house. The forces are still about 3,600 people short of authorized strength. The auditor general found that everyone who applied between 2022 and 2025, one in 13 made it to basic training. One in 13. And the image problem, the one that Hegsteth was poking at, does not get fixed with a budget line. It gets fixed by what the institution chooses to be about. This week, what it's about is a tribunal hearing over marriage counseling

for the unmarried. So I ask a bigger question, and I think a lot of Canadians have been quietly asking this for a while. How far does accommodation go? Because accommodation used to mean something very specific. It meant a ramp for a wheelchair. It meant prayer space. It meant you don't get fired for who you love. Those were real barriers. Removing them made the country better. And I believe that. Here the benefit is marriage counseling. And the eligibility rule is, I know, let's wrap our heads around it. Be married. The member isn't married. And the proposed fix is that the rule itself is discriminatory because her community finds it harder to form relationships locally. Follow that logic to the end. It means any eligibility rule in the country can be challenged by anyone who can describe

a group level reason they didn't meet it. Call it what you want. It is a request to be exempt from the definition of the benefit. And here's the part I find most poignant. If you remember the fight, 20 years ago, this country had a hard, serious argument over marriage equality. It went to the Supreme Court. It went to Parliament. The Civil Marriage Act of 2005 and the case that one, the case I agreed with, was that marriage matters, that it's an institution with meaning and obligations, and it was wrong to keep gay and lesbian Canadians out of it. We won that argument as a country, and I'm so proud that we did. So now, two decades later, a member of the forces is standing in front of the tribunal saying, in effect, that the institution shouldn't

matter for the purposes of the benefit attached to it. You can't have it both ways. Either marriage means something and the benefits that come with it are tied to it, or it doesn't. and the people who fought for it were fighting for a piece of paper. By that logic, you know, I could identify as a member of the working class so I could take benefit of a lower tax bracket by way of the CRA. I'm kidding. Mostly. And then the last piece, the one I feel most strongly about,

for about a decade now, the Canadian Armed Forces has been told officially that its job is to look like Canada. There is a target on paper set back in 2016 for women to make up a question. quarter the forces by this year. And the auditor general just said they are nowhere close. There are targets for every category you can name. And I understand the impulse. Canada is a mosaic and we are right to be proud of it. But I don't want the military to be a mirror. A mirror shows you what is already there. I want the military to be a filter. I want to take people from every part of this country, from every background, every language, every faith, and select the ones

who overindex encourage, honor, duty, willingness to sacrifice. Those are basic but essential categories that should count once you're in uniform. The mosaic matters. The mosaic is the thing being protected. The whole point of a fighting force is that it is the one part of society

that is deliberately unlike the rest of society so that the rest of society can go on being itself. Somebody who signs up for that and then takes the institution to a federal tribunal because it couldn't provide counseling for a marriage that doesn't exist has told me something about what they think the uniform is for. And the human rights tribunal, by sending it to a hearing,

has told me about what Ottawa thinks the uniform is for. The fix is simple to describe. The forces should fight this one. Do not settle. Don't quietly rewrite the policy. Fight it. Win it. and say so out loud and why.

The military exists to defend the country. Someone else can run test cases. Mark Carney has done the hard part on money. Now somebody has to do the hard part on seriousness because the world is laughing and I'd like to give them less material. In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $26 an hour.

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