found it. gotta love the parental reactions, eh?
Quentin
At first glance, Jamie Warren and Alissa MacDonald, both 12, in messy pony tails and hip-hugging pants, do not look much like military material. The girls stare at their feet, shift back and forth and giggle a lot when speaking to adults. One wears a thick chain necklace in deference to her rap-star crush; the other has covered her arms in gummy bracelets.
Yet here they are on a Wednesday evening after school, having just signed up to join the army cadets -- not because their parents told them to -- but because "everyone is doing it," they explain.
"Lots of kids from our school are here," Jamie says, who until now, undertook activities no more structured than playing on the soccer and basketball teams at her public middle school. "More than five I think."
After facing rock-bottom enrolment during the 1980s and '90s and the closure of such long-serving units as Upper Canada College's Cadet Battalion, the Canadian Forces' after-school training program for 12- to 18-year-olds is making a comeback, on the eve of its 125th anniversary. Seven new units started up this year; one in Winnipeg, four in suburban British Columbia and two in small towns in Ontario. National enrolment stands at about 55,000 regular participants, an increase of almost 10,000 over the last decade. Numbers are still significantly below historic highs during the First and Second World Wars, but air, navy and army cadets remain the federal government's largest youth program.
The three-decade-old Brampton, Ont., unit the girls are joining, the 557 Royal Canadian Cadet Corps, sponsored by the Lorne Scots Regiment, is expected to reach 200 participants by the end of this year, up from from 27 two years ago. So many signed up in September the 557 Corps grew from four platoons to six and is looking to move their Wednesday evening sessions from the dingy First World War-era Brampton Armory, where the Canadian flags cadets use in their drills are stored in a tiny broom closet, to a larger and more modern building.
Growth is largely the result of word of mouth recommendations, since the cash-strapped Department of National Defence does little advertising. Students who join are drawn less by the drills and pageantry than the opportunity to get out of the suburbs and cities where they live to camp, sail, canoe and rock climb during occasional weekend sessions at cadet training centres. Costs are covered by Ottawa and during the summer, cadets get a small stipend to spend six weeks doing more of the same.
Diana Kennedy, mother of 12-year-old Kody Koczka, who just signed up with the Brampton unit, can't believe she bothered to scrounge $2,000 to send her son to a private camp in Muskoka last summer. "He doesn't want to go back," says Kennedy, a legal assistant. "He wants to go to cadets camp instead."
But some parents admit their children's sudden interest in the military caught them off guard.
"This is totally new to us," says Pearl Rajwanth, whose 13-year-old son, Jeremy, a soccer player and French immersion student, announced he was enrolling in the army cadets with a friend in September.
Rajwanth and her husband, David, confessed they felt "a little intimidated" watching rows of boys and girls salute, step left, right and stamp their feet up and down in response to commands shouted by their superiors during the Wednesday night drill practice. "He's my baby. I don't want him to get hurt," Pearl Rajwanth says.
But as they lingered in the doorway after dropping off their boy, they were clearly impressed by the perfect posture, crisp movements and pressed green uniforms of the rows of experienced cadets doing the drills.
By contrast, their son was part of the "new arrivals" group. Still learning the basics and waiting for their uniforms to arrive (each is fitted individually and paid for by Ottawa), the new cadets stood in rows at the back of the room looking like regular teenagers, with untucked shirts, stringy hair and sneakers. At one point, Warrant Officer Nathanaelle Normand, 15, the highest-ranking woman in the unit, who recently supervised lower-ranking cadets at the National Marksmanship Championship in Iqaluit, took the girls to the bathroom to teach them how to twist their hair into smooth buns.
The program long ago dropped its original mission of preparing boys for military service. Today's participants take courses in public speaking, stress management and how to deal with harassment, in addition to learning marching drills.
Girls and boys make up equal numbers among the younger cadets, but girls tend to drop out after age 15. Representation of visible minorities depends on the community where the unit is located: Blacks, Chinese and southeast Asians make up 40% of Brampton's cadets.
Advertising pamphlets touting the program's emphasis on leadership development and physical fitness resemble brochures for summer camp, with pictures of young men and women sailing, mountain biking and playing musical instruments.
Firearms are only mentioned in association with marksmanship, which is described as a sport "based on Olympic-style competition with an emphasis on safe handling and care of firearms."
Master Warrant Officer Raymond Ivanauskas, for example, got to spend six weeks at Alberta's Rocky Mountain Cadet Training Centre, climbing glaciers and kayaking as a result of his high placement on a leadership exam. The federal government paid for the camp. The 17-year-old from Brampton says he would never have been able to afford that kind of adventure program on his own.
Still, activities requiring obedience and discipline will always earn scorn from some teenagers. "Lots of people say, 'That's so stupid, that's so totally dumb,' when I tell them about it," says Jessica Sop, a 14-year-old Grade 9 student who earned the rank of Master Corporal after one year of cadet training.
"I tell them, 'I go camping, I know first aid, I know all this cool stuff.' I tell them they should come and check it out."
Master Corp Sop says her parents love the program. The stress management courses taught her to control her temper and better manage her school work; and she finally has started saving money, thanks to her stipend from summer camp and money from babysitting.
But no matter how much parents like aspects of cadets, the program evokes complicated emotions.
Cadets are not members of the Canadian Forces and the program is no longer used as a recruitment tool. But participating exposes students to the option of a military career, which is the first thing Karen and Gord Rees thought about when their son joined four years ago.
"I don't want my baby to go to war," Karen Rees says.
Watching their son get promoted to the high rank of Master Warrant Officer last week, they acknowledged his stint with <cadets> has had significant benefits: William, 16, cooks, cleans, does the laundry and is generally more helpful at home than his two older sisters, thanks to his leadership and survival training. "He looks you in the eye when he speaks, he's incredibly polite and well-organized," his mother says.
He also plans to apply to a technology program at Royal Military College in Kingston, Ont., next year. "I'm happy for him because it's what he wants," Rees says. "But you never completely forget about the worst-case scenarios."
