The Current - What keeps Retired Gen. Wayne Eyre up at night?

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

Retired General Wayne Eyre sits down with Matt Galloway to reflect on the forty-year military career he chronicles in his new memoir, Into the Breach: A Soldier’s Journey, from his time in Afghanistan, to handling the military's misconduct crisis as chief of the defence staff, to the culture changes and threats facing Canada today.

Guessing is for game shows, not your business, especially when your margin for error is zero. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT, with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails. So every AI action is permission aware, giving you accuracy 24-7, and the ability to not just get work done, but get it done right. It's a new work day. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Today, I would like to offer my sincere congratulations to General Wayne Eyre on his nomination as the chief of defense staff. General Eyre and I will continue to work hard in reforming the culture of the Canadian Armed Forces.

Changing the culture of the military was top of the agenda for General Wayne Eyre when he took over as Canada's top commander in 2021. The Canadian Armed Forces were grappling with an ongoing sexual misconduct crisis. His two immediate predecessors were themselves facing allegations. Add to that, it was the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Afghanistan was mere months away from falling to the Taliban, and more natural disasters, plus Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, were right around the corner. Retired General Wayne Eyre reflects on all of those challenges and his entire 40-year military career in a new memoir. It's called Into the Breach, a soldier's journey. And he's with me in our Toronto studio.

Wayne Air, good morning. Good morning, Matt. And thanks for having me on your show again. It's good to have you back on the program. Why did you want to be a soldier? You wanted to be a soldier from your earliest years, despite the fact that, as you say in the book, you didn't come really from a military family. No, I was drawn to it. My brothers and my cousins running around the woods in the farm in Saskatchewan was sought off hockey sticks patrolling against each other, joining Army cadets at a very young age at 12 really solidified it.

And from being a teenager onwards, I knew what I wanted to do, and that was to join the Canadian Armed Forces, the Army in particular, and become an infantry officer. What did you imagine you'd be doing as a member of the military? I thought I would be traveling to exotic, distant lands. and that sounds like the advertising company. And come see the world. Living an adventure. And I joined for the adventure. I joined for the lifestyle.

And, I mean, we'll talk about the specifics, but did you get what you signed up for? I think I did. You know, I used the term journey, and it certainly was a journey, that call to service, the facing of obstacles and challenges along the way, the professional growth,

the camaraderie, the ultimate challenges at the end, as being the chief of the defense staff, and then the reintegration home back into Canadian society. What was it like as a young recruit for you? Well, given that I had spent five years in Army cadets, many of the military skills I was pretty familiar with, the marching, the leadership, the field craft.

So I actually found basic training, not terribly challenging. What I was eager for, though, was the real field training, The training that we undertook at the combat training center in Gagetown as a young officer cadet undergoing infantry officer training. And I found that very, very rewarding. What was it that was most rewarding to you about it? Well, it was the ability to operate as a small team. You'd be put into a leadership role in that the camaraderie that was formed undergoing that type of training. It was the start of the adventure.

That adventure took you around the world. You served in Cyprus, in Croatia, in Afghanistan. How did your thinking about the role of the military evolve over that time? Well, it evolved significantly. In my first three missions, we're peacekeeping missions, Cyprus, Croatia, Bosnia, and then we got into the Afghanistan years, and I spent a good chunk of my career focused on Afghanistan. And then we went back to Great Power confrontation. And so if there was a watchword, for my time in uniform, it would be changed. The waning days of the Cold War, dissolution of the former Yugoslavia,

counterterrorism around the world, and then almost back to a Cold War type of environment. And I've come to believe that the use of the military has to be tied to political ends, to political objectives. And if those political objectives aren't laid out clearly, and there's not a direct linkage between the employment of the military to achieving those objectives,

well, it's going to be wasted effort, perhaps even counterproductive effort. You mentioned peacekeeping, and we'll get more into this, but it's interesting in that for a lot of Canadians, there is a big part of our national narrative that is wrapped up in the idea of peacekeeping

and who we are as peacekeepers. And you say in the book that that's in some way something that we need to get rid of, that we are no longer a nation of peacekeepers. We have a persistent myth Canada that we are a nation of peacekeepers, you write, and that myth needs to fade away. Well, we also need a much longer view of history. And if we take a look at Canadian military history, even the last century, World War I, World War II, Korea. The peacekeeping that we did

during the Cold War was a specific moment in time where that type of operation, where a lightly armed force could intervene between two sides to a conflict. That was an applicable, viable, type of military operation for a specific set of circumstances. Do you say the world is different now? The world is different. And so we saw that, and I saw it first hand, in Croatia, in 1993, at the Battle of the Madak pocket, where we were supposed to be on a peacekeeping mission, and it turned into high-intensity combat.

We see with missions today, there are no longer just two sides to any conflict. There are multiple sides with competing agendas, many of them seeking to spoil any potential peace. Many of the potential missions are in Africa right now, and local nations would be very reticent to have large Western forces come in. What does that do to our national myth then? Well, we have to take a longer view of what we have been as Canadians. The first military history of Canada was about the military history of a non-warlike people.

but taking up arms when necessary. So it's that longer view of what Canada is and what we do. Our veterans of the First and Second World War never saw themselves as peacekeepers. They sell themselves as soldiers, sailors, aviators, applying violence reluctantly to get the job done to achieve the national objective. This week marks the 25th anniversary since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. And Canadian troops followed a couple of months later. You played a key role in that mission.

What do you remember most about your time there? So I write extensively about my time in Afghanistan. And my feelings, my beliefs on where the mission was going, was up and down, ranged at times from being quite negative to at other times more cautiously optimistic. But what I remember the most is the tremendous performance of our men and women in uniform. In fact, that's a theme that goes throughout the book. It's just the great people that we have in the Canadian Armed Forces and the tremendous work they do. Our people did everything they were asked to do. But as I write in the book as well, there was no military

solution for Afghanistan. There had to be a political in-state. But everything their country asked them to do, they stood up and they did it. And those who are listening, who are Afghan veterans, they need to hold their heads high, regardless of the overall. outcome because they performed magnificently. I want to talk about that outcome, but one of the things that you read about it in the book is part of your duty was to tell a soldier's family that that soldier had been killed in action. You tell a specific story about an incident in Edmonton, and you say that it was the

hardest thing that you had done then or since. Tell me about that. So it was. It was in 2006. I was the acting brigade commander. I was commanding a third battalion of Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry in Emmington, but that week I was the acting brigade commander, and First Battalion of the PPCLI had suffered mass casualties in Afghanistan.

So there we are on the ground having to organize next-of-kin notification. There was one in Emmettin, so I took this one on myself. And when I told that young wife that she was a widow, that was the hardest thing I ever did. I met her several weeks ago in Emmetton, and we relived that moment. But from that moment onward, when I had to have a hard discussion with somebody, I would put it in context and say it and tell myself, it's nowhere near as hard as that conversation that I had to have in 2006. What does it like to have that responsibility? There's another story in which you take on a training exercise, troops to Las Vegas for four days to blow off some steam. And you did it in part because, as you say in the book, you knew in your heart that not all of them would return from Afghanistan.

What does it like to live with that? So that Las Vegas trip in particular, it goes back to traveling the world and seeing exotic, distant locations. So we spent almost two months in the Mojave Desert doing some pretty intense training for Afghanistan. But we had a four-day break. And so there were some reluctance from my chain of command, my chain of command above me to let the troops loose in Las Vegas. But I knew in my heart that they were going into combat. and this is an opportunity for them to see part of the world that many of them may not see. But also that some of them may be killed in action.

Some of them wouldn't come back. But this is a reality of command. Some have called it the burden of command, knowing that those that you work with and maybe some of your decisions will result in friendly casualties. How do you live with that? You have to realize it's part of the role. you can become very stoic about it and realize you can make every right decision in the book, but the enemy still gets a vote and bad things will happen. So what you do is you focus your efforts to make sure that your people are as well prepared,

well equipped as possible when they go into harm's way, knowing that bad stuff can still happen. You were Chief of the Defense Staff in August of 2021 when the final evacuations from Afghanistan, understand were taking place as the Taliban closed in and the government fell to the Taliban. And we, people know those scenes. The horror scenes of people climbing over fences hanging off the bottom of aircraft to try to get out because of the desperation that was going on. And there was a lot of criticism at the time of how the Trudeau government handled that,

in part because an election had been called and there was some difficulty perhaps in understanding what the political directions were. What did that look like from where you were sitting? So yes, there was a lot of criticism. about what was happening, but we have to remember that Canada shut down its mission in Afghanistan in 2014. In fact, I was there on the ground at Kabul watching the Canadian flag being lowered in front of the headquarters. You also write in the book that you weren't pleased with that decision, that you felt that in some ways it came too early. Well, I had mixed feelings about that.

You say that it wasn't for you to say whether that was the right decision or not, but certainly I think you weren't very happy. No, and I thought a better timing would have been several weeks or a month later. But the timing happened in part because of an election. Yes, but there was the first successful political change of power in Afghanistan's history based on their April 5th election, April 5th, 2014. And that would have been a critical or a key date that we could have used as a condition to change our mission. When the government fell and the Taliban swooped back in, I mean, what was that like to watch that? Well, it was horrifying because a country that we had poured so much blood, treasure, effort to see it go that way.

Defeat to this point has not been part of the Canadian military lexicon. But we also needed to be proud of the effort that the Canadian Armed Forces did. So we hadn't had a military presence there for seven years. And we projected force from the other side of the world into a contested environment. And we pulled out 3,700 people. That is not insignificant. And I was so proud of the work of our people on the ground, our air crew, our headquarters staff, all coming together. We had some operators on the ground who had double-digit missions in Afghanistan and Iraq

and said that two-week period was the most emotionally intense. in their careers. There was a federal election campaign underway. What kind of problems did that cause with that evacuation? So probably the biggest one from my perspective is the inability to communicate with Canadians because there is a slowdown of communications, rightly so not to affect the election.

Communications blackout, if you will, part of the convention. But during a period of crisis like that, it was difficult to relay the truth. And in a vacuum, stories start appearing, speculation in some cases. Stories like what? Outright mistruth.

Oh, one case in particular was what our troops were actually doing on the ground. There was, and you have to remember, the Afghans were desperate. Well, there was a video circulating. of some of our troops on the wall, sitting down, having a drink of water, and the narrative was,

why can't they be helping Afghans right there? Well, these troops were going, you know, 20, 22 hours a day, nonstop. And so very, very unfair. I also write, I saw the same thing happen in terms of the communication in 2008. I was the director of operations for our overseas headquarters. There was a series of hurricanes

that it hit Haiti and we were launching a relief mission. And it was very difficult to communicate with Canadians at that point as well. So I'd already seen this a decade plus before. What about this? And we've talked about this extensively in the program. The narrative that Canada abandoned many of its allies in Afghanistan, particularly Afghans who had risked their lives to work for this country. And we've talked to people who've been stuck there,

who've been stuck in Pakistan, who fear for their lives. but also those who were trying to bring them here. And the sense was in that chaos of the evacuation, some of the people that we as a nation relied on, we left behind. But we've also got to remember that there were 39 million people in that country. And it would be nice. It would have been excellent to be able to save them all.

We're not talking about saving them all. We're talking about the people who worked for us. Yeah. Well, we were also over there to support Afghanistan and to support Afghans. And it was a tragic situation. warnings were going out months before the fall of Afghanistan. And, you know, some choose to follow it. Some chose not to.

But again, in a chaotic situation like that, you know, getting out as many as we did, it was almost impossible to get out everybody. So you don't believe we've abandoned people or left people behind? You know, it's a matter of perspective. You know, once the evacuation was over, the task went to, you know, global affairs and immigration Canada to see what they can, what they could do through diplomatic channels. And we continue to receive, I understand they continue to receive requests. We also need to realize that Canada was the destination of choice.

And many had worked for multiple countries, you know, three, four, five, depending on, on, the circumstances, and Canada had a very generous immigration program at the time. But that speaks to our country and just how good it is and how attractive it is to so many around the world. So many of the gains that Canadian troops fought for in Afghanistan have been rolled back even further than perhaps the line that they were at before because of the return of the Taliban. Was it worth it? Well, that is a question, a very personal question, that each and every one of us needs to

wrestle with. From your perspective, as somebody who was there on the Taliban? ground. From my perspective, we gave the Afghans 20 years. We collectively, the coalition, to turn their country into something better. And I've come to realize that an externally imposed solution from the outside, unless it's embraced and devised and owned locally, is bound to fail. And as I've reflected over the years, one of the criteria for us intervening in another situation is the host nation elite. Does their leadership own the challenge, own the problem? I contrast it with Ukraine. I went into Ukraine shortly before the large scale invasion in

December of 2021. And Ukrainian leaders were very clear with me. We, we're very clear with me. We don't want the West to shed a drop of blood for us. We're going to do that ourselves. We want your stuff. We want your support. But we own this. And so back to that, just the last point on this, back to that widow that you needed to go and talk to about her loved one who was killed in action. What would you say to her?

Was it worth it? Yeah. This is a super personal complex question. And we would talk about service. And, you know, was it worth it from a serving your country perspective? Yes. Was it worth it from the eventual outcome? Well, that's hard to say right now, given what's happening in Afghanistan.

You know, one of the things I realized serving in Korea as I was over there and saw our veterans from the Korean War come back, and they would see the vibrant, thriving democracy that South Korea had become. it put their service in context. You know, they could really see how it was worth it. And, you know, I would use that line as I would travel and talk to our troops, training Ukrainians, talk to our troops who are stationed in Latvia and tell them, I want you to come back here in 30, 40, 50 years with your grandchildren and tell them that you were part of this. You were part of this, the success of these nations.

I have a hard time seeing that happening in Afghanistan in, you know, 20, 30, 40 years. You never know, but I have a hard time right now. Guessing is for game shows, not your business, especially when your margin for error is zero. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT, with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails. So every AI action is permission aware, giving you accuracy 24-7, and the ability to not just get work done, but get it done right. It's a new workday. This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort.

Journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking long ship, with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment, on board, and on shore. With a variety of voyages and sailing dates to choose from, now is the time to explore Europe's waterways. Learn more at viking.com. It was a report that came out in 2015, the Deschamps report, that underlied a culture that normalized low-level harassment creating the conditions for more serious misconduct within the military. You write in this book that earlier in your career, you were in your words, naively oblivious to the issue of sexual misconduct. What do you mean by that?

Well, I think most of us, many were. What do you mean? And I would talk to former subordinates who were. in various units I'd commanded, and our focus was on operations, our focus was on getting ready for operations, but not aware of, perhaps in some cases, an undercurrent of that type of behavior. You know, not even knowing what questions to ask. What do you think you missed? You say that in the book that you grew up predominantly, and your career is mostly spent

predominantly in a man's world. What do you think you missed? You know, I missed some of the microaggressions, some of those comments that could lead to pain, could lead to disrespect. Let's face it, operational effectiveness is predicated on teamwork. And if we can't have teams that are built on respect, built on being able to work together, we are going to fail. And so that period, in fact, the period when you and I chatted on this show was a period

of incredible introspection, all stress for me. And for the institution as well. You know, what have we been not getting right all of? these years. So we put ourselves under a microscope. And many have applauded us because there was no other institution in Canada that put themselves under such a microscope to better understand themselves and to try to address these real issues. Among those who were wielding the microscope were your own troops, members of the Canadian Armed Forces. And you write about this remarkable scene in which you went to Bagotville to speak with some troops. And a young corporal asks you a

question that you say, cut to the bone. What was the question? The question was, in the context of a series of allegations against senior officers, how can I trust you? What's your answer to that? And my answer was, first of all, it took a lot of courage for a corporal to ask a general that question, but she was right. Trust is something that's built up over a long time, but can be destroyed in the flash of a moment. And it's not like a light switch where you can just turn back on. It's got to be rebuilt with tangible change, one step at a time. There are going to be missteps along the way. I want to talk about what has changed. I spoke with then-justice, now Governor General, Louise Arbor, back in 2022. She, in that capacity, as a former Supreme

Court and Justice, was investigating the issue of sexual misconduct in the military. Have a listen to Louise Arbor from 2022. The most important culture change is in them accepting that they need external input and external assistance. Don't think you could fix everything yourself, which is up to now how they viewed culture change. They've launched all kinds of initiatives convinced that they need the change, but that they can do it. And my answer to that is no, because you're even oblivious to some of the elements that make it so hard to change that culture. Wayne Eyre, she said in her report, which was blistering, that some members of the Canadian Armed Forces are more at risk at harm on a day-to-day basis from their comrades than from the enemy.

And that when it comes to culture change, the leadership of the CAF seems to have been incapable of examining which aspects of its culture have been the most deficient. Can people trust the military to make its own changes? Yeah, so that's a pretty deep question. And when she came in, what I directed was we were going to open all of the doors and welcome this external review because we had a quarter century saying we've got this. and it didn't work. Okay, let's change it.

Let's have external expertise come in and take a look. But let's also build a implementation mechanism to take those recommendations and make them a reality. That is still ongoing. And history is going to be the ultimate arbiter of, you know, were we successful or not. But I guess her point was that this isn't about reports and it's not about people looking at individual incidents. that this is about culture change, that you need to change. And we've heard this from Louise Arbor. We've heard this from former members of the Armed Forces as well,

who felt as though the institution wasn't taking this as seriously as it could, that this is about culture change. And in the book, you say, there are those who were calling for wholesale culture change. But these are your words. This worried me. What worries you about the idea of culture change in the military? There were elements of the culture that we absolutely had to retain. Like what?

So the willingness to put oneself in the military. harm's way to conduct the mission, to protect others, to deploy to the other side of the world, leaving your families behind, to be a force of good in the world. It's that type of selfless service that is so important for our men and women in uniform. What aspects of the culture have to go? The exclusionary aspects that treat some people with disrespect that weren't welcoming to all. You know, especially as the face of Canada changed, Our demographics have changed significantly over the course of the last decade, two decades, three decades. The way that our teams are composed are changing.

So the way that we lead has to change, it couldn't be a cookie cutter solution, or we treated everybody the same. We had to understand the individual backgrounds, the strengths, the areas for development, the aspirations, to be able to better build those teams. Part of the institutional change that you were involved in, I mean, there's a big debate going on in the United States around this woke, versus warrior culture. It's also cropped up here in Canada,

and you face criticism for some of the changes you made within the CAF, particularly implementing this gender neutral dress code. What do you say to people who think there needs to be a return to what they call a warrior culture? Well, I call it a false dichotomy. The whole idea of a warrior culture, we need to unpack that one as well. You know, our veterans of the First and Second World War didn't call themselves warriors. There were soldiers, sailors, aviators. If we take a look at what a warrior has been in history,

it has been an individual who has been focused on personal glory, has reveled in the application of violence, whereas professional soldiers, sailors, aviators, operators, have wielded violence only when necessary, have focused on discipline, have focused on teamwork, not individual glory, not individual honor. Let me ask you about funding. This comes up throughout the book,

and in particular around what's happening now. And it feels a bit like a different time when it comes to how this country looks at the armed forces. You are critical in the book of the Trudeau government in what you call its strategic indecision and procrastination over military spending. What do you make of what the current Prime Minister Mark Carney is doing when it comes to spending? So this has been a historical reality for all of Canadian history, unpreparedness. You take a look at 1914, 1939, 1950. But throughout my career, I could see that challenge in resourcing readiness. in the post or even during the end of the latter days of the cold war as we went into the former

Yugoslavia and we had back to back to back deployments the demand signal went up but the resourcing went down so we're being asked to do more and more with less and less and it really came to the fore after the russia's large-scale invasion of ukraine and so i repeatedly made the point that okay we need to invest the world is becoming a more dangerous place and one of the reasons i write about this is to shed a light on the messiness of political military relations. Yes, the government did not make decisions as fast as I wanted. But I also talk about the imperative in a democracy of military subservience to duly elected civilian officials. We follow orders.

They may not take military advice, and that is their right. They are elected. Military members aren't. But you say we should feel shame that it took up a berating and pressure from our closest ally to take our own defense seriously. Do you think down the line we'll thank Donald Trump? for this? Well, many have said that he is helping us mature as a country to develop more autonomy in terms of our decision making. Do things for our country that should have been done some time ago. Diversifying our friends, partners, allies, making us a more resilient country.

Indeed, a more resilient Canada makes for a more secure U.S. if you take a look at it. The approach the government is taking, I believe, is the right one. Do you think we can trust the United States? Do you think that the United States is an ally we can trust? In what context? You know, there's so many different... You have a president of the United States who posts up maps showing all of North America with the Stars and Stripes on it threatens to turn us into the 51st state.

Can we trust the United States as an ally? Well, this is one of the questions that many are wrestling with. What do you believe? I know it's a driver. It has to be a driver for us to be able to do more ourselves to assume that we may not have help when we need it. And this is the first role of a nation. First role of a state is the ability to defend the state and not rely on others to do it for you. We've been pretty secure behind three oceans, one permanently frozen,

and up to now, a benign superpower to the south. Up to now. But with an increasingly globally integrated security environment, we've got to realize that events on the other side of the world can have a pretty dramatic effect here at home rapidly. You have a line in the book around these times. You say some have a pined that we need national service, conscription in these dangerous times, and they could be right.

Are they? Is that something we need? Well, I deliberately said they could be right because I haven't decided myself yet. Early in my career, I was dead set against conscription, seeing conscript armies around the world and just how bad they were. But that being said, there's been times in our nation's history we've had to call upon conscription for our own national interest. As we face dark future ahead, we can look for examples

from perhaps some of our Nordic partners, Finland, Sweden, who use conscription, there are a host of different roles that need to be filled in the national security realm. You know, one that I talk about in the book is the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters, which will call upon a labor force. Now, what the military generally provides in these cases is a organized discipline, self-sustaining, self-deploying labor pool to do relatively easy tasks like fill sandbags or dig hand-trench for, of fire, you know, having an interim level of capacity at municipal and provincial levels could help rapidly fill that void. Are you comfortable with the military being called into those

roles? I mean, it speaks to what's the purpose of the Canadian military today? No, it does. And, you know, this is why I believe that we need a more capacity at local level that can respond faster and not having the military as a force of first resort when crises come. And To deal with climate change, but also, as you write about it in the book, floods and storms and being in long-term care homes during pandemics. Yes. And all of that erodes readiness for other types of operations, for deterrence, for our ability to operate in the national interest overseas or in the Arctic. So it's got to be a balance. These are really unsettling times for a lot of people. What keeps way in air up at night?

What wakes you up at 3 o'clock in the morning when you take a look at the threats around the world? The return of the possibility of great power war. You know, throughout history, a lot of wars have started because of miscalculation. And we've got a set of autocrats who have surrounded themselves with synchophants, who've created bubbles of ideology around them. That means it's very difficult to see the perspective of the other, to have clear communication with the other. And so miscalculation is possible. Unintended escalation where small incidents can rattle. rapidly escalate out of control.

We live in a time of transition as we move from global order to global disorder before we reorder ourselves. And periods of transition are fraught with risk. But in a case like this, where it's difficult to communicate, difficult to share perspectives, it's even higher risk. And there's a place for Canada in that world and that disorder world? There is. And it means talking to everybody. We need to coexist. We need to coexist with the U.S., with China, with other great powers, bigger countries in the world. But we need to do it from a position of being strong enough to ensure that we can make her own decisions and we can shape whatever order is emerging from this world.

Wayne Eyre, it's a great pleasure to have you here with us in studio. Thank you very much. Well, thank you. General Wayne Eyre's new memoir is called Into the Breach, a soldier's journey. He's with me in our Toronto studio. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca. Thanks.