We are lucky in that we have no need to recruit our youth for this task – we already have somebody who keeps the Russians under constant surveillance from her porch…
(she also has some friends that live a bit closer to the Russians who will let her know if they are up to something)
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Yes, but in favor of their own youth organization. They also banned all other political parties and community groups not connected directly to the party. And as you pointed out to @jhbadger, the scouts had military connections anyhow.
Really, all of these groups are bound up with the building of national identities anyhow, either in concert with that project or in rejection of it.
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#If you see something, please say something, eh?
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The Soviets did the same thing, banning Scouts and replacing them with the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization, with other Communist countries following suit with their own Pioneers. Totalitarians don’t like independent civic groups.
Having a military streak is not the same as being a harbinger of totalitarianism though. Unlike the Pioneers and the Hitler Youth the Scouts are not a branch of a political party, and rival groups in the US, UK and Canada are not banned.
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Right, which was actually the point I was responding to…
And the point I was making! 
No, but much of western society does tend to glorify war and the military. Being a pacifist is considered beyond the pale by some and just plain weird by many, not just in totalitarian societies. What totalitarian societies have done (historically speaking) is to take ideas that came out of the enlightenment and take them to an extreme degree.
Well done, sir! Thank you for that.
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The juxtaposition made it seem like you were calling Scouts fascist or crypto-fascist. Glad to see I was wrong!
The Conservatives kinda do sound that way when they say “Junior Canadian Rangers work closely with the Canadian Rangers, providing eyes and ears over our vast Northern frontier.” Though really the platform sounds to me like looking like doing something while not actually spending any money. The bit that says “a re-elected Conservative government will honour the Canadian Rangers for their service and dedication by letting them keep their current Lee-Enfield rifles” in particular sounds to me like “we won’t spend a lot of money on your guns and will use tradition as an excuse.”
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Not mine, but worth sharing, eh?
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Not at all. But it would be myopic not to see the nationalist overtones of the organization, though, especially given the roots.
Putting minors to military auxiliary service is one of the features of a totalitarian regime.
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Every Woodie alumnus I know was high as fuck throughout their entire time with them 
As a non Canadian who wouldn’t normally get interested in these sorts of things, it appears to be about symbolism.
Expanding the Junior Rangers is also about symbolism, unless it’s sort of a “expand the Rangers, and scale up the Junior Rangers as a sort of by product.”
Maybe this plays differently in Nunavut.
Scouting, everywhere it has been organized, has always had a patriotic and nationalistic edge. And why not? teaching Boy Scouts marksmanship or first aid is teaching them useful skills. And in the case of future war, those kids would be ahead of the game, and have skills that could keep them alive. That is not warmongering, it is prudence. Wars happen, even to nice countries.
Get your head out of the 19th century. Teaching minors to shoot will save no one in a modern war. First aid, maybe. Though it’s about as effective as depositing band-aids along the highway, hoping to curb traffic deaths.
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This sounds kind of the like the US’s Civil Air Patrol (CAP). My little brother went into CAP in Maine. Honestly, i, wasn’t an awful thing. Basically, they learn about and help with search and rescue. While there are still plenty of folks in various emergency services doing this, Maine is a big place with a fuck-ton of forests, lakes, and coast line, and a very small population. Further, the kind of equipment you need to mount any sort of rescue is often times pretty extreme (helicopters, boats able to operate in nasty whether, off road vehicles, snow vehicles, etc) You end up spending a lot of resources to protect a very small number of people. One way to offset a little of the pain is to use something like CAP to offer a little extra man power. You can get a bunch of local teens to triangulate the location of a transponder, or offer up warm bodies when doing a search in a forest. In theory, in war time, it lets you get a much larger number of watchers out with eyes on the borders; which was the original purpose of CAP. Having hung out with CAP kids, it think it is kind of a mistake to scoff and assume they are unprofessional or incompetent. A lot of them take it very seriously.
You guys kind of scoff at the idea of using teens, but it really isn’t crazy. They learn fast, are local, and have time to burn. You don’t need to go to boot camp to be able to spot and identify a plane or boat. If there is really anything problematic about the plan, it really is the indoctrination of kids into military culture. All countries already essentially do that in normal recruitment, but these sorts of paramilitary scouting organizations kick up the indoctrination to when they are even less effectively able to parse it out for themselves.
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@Heckblazer - It does sound a bit like that, but it’s also pretty obvious Harper isn’t actually suggesting the Junior Rangers start scouting for enemy combatants.
Also, they’re keeping the Lee-Enfield rifles, but they’re also getting new rifles. I’m guessing lots of rangers were upset about having the rifles they liked replaced with one’s they didn’t know and this was Harper’s way of neutralising the issue. Two guns always better than one right?
Makes perfect sense, actually. Since no one under the age of 50 would vote conservative, no chance that sending these kids into danger would cost the conservatives any votes when these kids finally come of age.
Aye, but then again there are not any enemy combatants. Harper can belch bellicose about “Hostile states” all he wants, but it is Canada that is hostile to Russia, not the other way around. And Canada isn’t even serious in it’s hostility, it’s commitment to the Ukraine is openly symbolic in nature and from a realist view politically, nothing but opportunistic theatre.
Canada withdrew it’s ambassador over the Crimean Crisis, but that act was not reciprocated. Canada did a bit of individual sanctioning, Russia did the same. No big whup. Canada’s Foreign Minister at the time, a complete asshole named John Baird, Godwinned on the international stage, stupidly, inaccurately, and was called out for it by Canada’s own allies. Harper visited the Ukraine for the same reason he calls Russia a hostile state, so he can be a big man wearing his big boy pants. He sent some military, and everyone is so impressed for what amounts to a pop-gun on a safari.
Meanwhile trade hums along, all the bilateral agreements and agencies relating to the North are intact and cooperating and what it all boils down to is that Stephen Harper is free to engage in as much sabre-rattling stupidity as he wants, safe in the knowledge that he is a flea on the butt of the bear, which isn’t even inclined to acknowledge the noise.
If Russia doesn’t consider itself a hostile state, what Harper thinks is both inaccurate and irrelevant.
The Crimean stuff is deadly serious, but the deadly serious talk about it by Harper is mostly theatre and he loves to portray Canada militarily, just not in the peacekeeping way that the nation is respectfully famous for. He’s a war hawk who wishes he could fly but knows he is grounded. It’s pretty pathetic.
Ha, I remember a good recent comparative. He’s spending millions and millions to celebrate the War of 1812. But the anniversary of teh adoption of the national flag, the banner that represents us to the world. $50,000 CAD. Fifty Big Ones. Or, as Harper would put it, about 38,000 US.
He’s a turd, just a particularly cunning one. Full of air. You know the kind, you have to flush 3 or four times to finally get it to swirl out of the bowl? That’s Harper, a tenacious floating turd.
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