Stephen Axworthy is a social studies teacher and has been a municipal councillor for six years in rural Manitoba.
Recent revelations of extremist infiltration within Western militaries – including terrorism charges laid against individuals with links to the Canadian Armed Forces – should disturb every citizen. But they should not surprise us. These developments point to a deeper failure: we are training people to defend democracy without first ensuring they understand it.
Civic education in Canada has been slowly eroded. Our students are graduating without a basic grasp of their rights and freedoms, or of the historical forces – fascism, colonialism, genocide – that make those rights necessary in the first place. They often don’t know that slavery existed in Canada. Many can’t explain what led to the rise of demagogues like Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Mao Zedong or Joseph Stalin. Nor are they aware of the crimes against humanity each engaged in or how they consistently turned on their supporters, let alone understand how they operated through disinformation and polarization, to the point that most Canadians are unaware of the history of the Holocaust, the Holodomor or the so-called Great Leap Forward.
Instead of being taught to think critically about power, rights and democracy, students are often left to absorb oversimplified or misleading narratives from social media, YouTube or partisan voices at home. Teachers, wary of backlash or lacking institutional support, sometimes boil down their teaching plans, presenting sanitized stories or “cool” facts about military strategy and skipping over the lessons that history can teach us about civic responsibility and empathy.
Take the “freedom” convoy in Ottawa, where “protesters” engaged in civil disobedience not through peaceful means, but by trampling on the rights and freedoms of other citizens while waving signs about the Bill of Rights, a piece of legislation that ceased having legal force in Canada in 1982. (One shudders to think that these references might have been to the U.S. Bill of Rights instead.)
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The Charter of Rights and Freedoms – our foundational legal document that supersedes all but the treaties – defines the rights and freedoms of all Canadians and those within our country. Yet, there are few in Canada who know what rights and freedoms we have and, most importantly, the limitations placed on them. Simply put, no one has the right to infringe on another person’s rights or freedoms in this country, as so many did in Ottawa.
This is all symptomatic of larger problems in our society: a lack of basic civic knowledge, the rise of extremism and the fall of democratic norms. This wasn’t all just precipitated by social media and increasingly limited attention spans – it’s an education problem.
We equip our soldiers with the most dangerous and demanding of skills – how to kill and wage war – yet we far too often fail to give them an equally rigorous education in what our nation stands for. A soldier who understands the value and strength of democracy, multiculturalism and equality is far less likely to become the tool of those who would seek to undermine it.
Civic education must become the pillar of military training, not just an afterthought. Those we entrust to inflict lethal force on command must also be trained in the foundational elements of the system we ask them to defend. The Charter, the history of the democratic struggle and the values of empathy, pluralism and global co-operation are central tenets of what it means to be Canadian. These lessons must not be relegated to a weekend seminar, but be foundational throughout a military career. Our best soldiers should be more than warriors. They should be exemplars of the democracy they are sworn to defend.
The stakes are too high for us to keep treating civics as optional. A well-informed populace is our first line of defence against tyranny and demagoguery. When we fail to teach the history, values and structures of democracy, we create fertile ground for division, misinformation and extremism – even within the institutions meant to protect us.
It’s time to take civic education seriously, starting in the classroom and extending all the way to the ranks of the Canadian Armed Forces. The health of our democracy depends on it.