The Snowbirds Are Retiring. So Is the Military’s Connection to Public Life

After fifty-five years and more than 2,700 displays for over 140 million people, the 431 Air Demonstration Squadron will fly its last season in the CT-114 Tutor in 2026. A replacement aircraft has been chosen, the CT-157 Siskin II, and the new team is expected to be operational in the early 2030s. In the meantime, the squadron stands down.

A lot of Canadians will be disappointed. That reaction is completely understandable. The Snowbirds are one of the most recognizable symbols of the Canadian Armed Forces. They have performed at air shows across North America every summer for more than five decades. For most Canadians, watching those red-and-white jets fly in formation overhead has been their most direct, personal encounter with the military. Now, that fixture is going away for the better part of a decade.

The aircraft decision itself is defensible. The Tutors have been flying for over sixty years and were overdue for retirement. A 2003 Department of National Defence study recommended immediate replacement to have new aircraft in service by 2010. Better late than never.

But there is a question the announcement leaves unanswered: When the CAF’s most visible public presence disappears from summer skies, what replaces it? And does the CAF understand what it is losing? The Snowbirds are not just an air show act. For most Canadians, they are the only direct encounter with their military they will ever have.

I ask because I have spent a significant part of my career working on exactly this relationship; as a former provincial chair of the Canadian Forces Liaison Council, my mandate was to increase employer support for military reservists. Reservists are part-time soldiers who hold civilian jobs, and their ability to deploy, train, and serve depends directly on whether their employers understand and value what they do.

One of the most effective tools we had was the Executrek. We took civilian employers out into the field and put them directly in front of their reservist employees at work: drills, demonstrations, live fire exercises. The effect was consistent and significant. Employers who arrived with limited understanding of what their employees actually did on their days off left with a fundamentally different view. They saw the precision, the discipline, the technical skill, and the leadership that military training produces. Disinterested employers became engaged ones. Supportive in ways they had not been before: more willing to grant the time off required for training and deployment, more aware of the skills the CAF was developing in people who then brought those skills back to their civilian workplaces.

The lesson was straightforward. Exposure changed everything. An employer who had never seen a reservist at work had no basis for valuing what that person did. An employer who had stood on a training ground and watched did. The Snowbirds operate on the same principle at a much larger scale.

Canadians like their military. They just do not think about joining it. That gap is a problem.

Canadians trust the Canadian Armed Forces more than any other institution in the country. A Leger survey released on Remembrance Day 2025 put that trust at 75 percent, ahead of police, the courts, and the federal government. Three-quarters of Canadians say the CAF makes them proud. A Nanos poll from March 2026 found that willingness to serve full-time in a major conflict had doubled in four months, from 12 to 24 percent, as the security environment became more pressing.

By any measure, this is a population that respects and values its military. And yet, the same Nanos poll found that only 33 percent of Canadians see a military career as a good option for young people today.

That gap, between high trust and low career consideration, needs to be addressed. Most Canadians value the institution deeply. Very few think of it as somewhere they or their children might work. Pride does not automatically become enlistment. Something has to connect the two, and that connection depends on familiarity: on encountering the military in ordinary life often enough that service feels like something people like you actually do.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has committed to rebuilding, rearming, and reinvesting in the Canadian Armed Forces. Canada has hit the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 2 percent gross domestic product spending target in 2025/26. Budget 2025 committed $81.8 billion to the CAF. “Our sovereignty faces the greatest threats in generations,” Carney has said. “The world is becoming more divided and dangerous.” The ambition is real, and the investment is real.

So are the recruiting numbers required to back it up.

The CAF currently sits 12,350 people short of its authorized strength of 101,500. The recruiting target for fiscal year 2026/27 is 8,200 new enrolments, the highest in years. Reported mobilization planning envisions a force eventually approaching 500,000. Applications to join are up 13 percent. That is encouraging. It is also worth noting that between 2022 and 2025, the CAF received 192,000 applications and recruited one in thirteen. The interest exists. Converting it remains the challenge.

There are two different challenges here, and they require different solutions. The first challenge is the recruiting pipeline: the process of turning an interested applicant into an enrolled member. Processing times, application systems, medical screening, security clearances. The CAF has been working on this, with real results. In fiscal year 2025/26, it enrolled 7,310 Regular Force members, the highest in more than thirty years. The system is improving.

The second challenge is the recruiting pool: the population of Canadians who have actually considered military service as an option. This is determined upstream of the pipeline entirely. It is not about processing times or application portals. It is about whether enough Canadians have had enough contact with the military that service feels like a live possibility for someone in their situation.

These are different problems. The pipeline improvements address the first. They do not address the second. And the second is where the Snowbirds question lands.

Visibility builds the pool. Advertising does not. The United States Army spent $1.1 billion on advertising in fiscal year 2025. The Government Accountability Office found that favourable views of the military were still declining among the age group it most needed to reach.

The reason advertising fails is structural, not tactical. Eighty percent of young Americans who enlist today have a family member who served. The US military is drawing overwhelmingly from the same population across generations: families where service is already understood, normalized, and valued. Young people without that family connection, the large majority of the population, are not considering service at meaningful rates regardless of how much is spent on advertising. A US Department of Defense official stated in 2024 that, for the first time since tracking began, most young people had never considered military service, attributing this directly to limited familiarity with military opportunities.

Canada’s situation is structurally identical. The military is becoming a self-selecting institution, drawing from the families that already know it while losing reach into the broader population.

You cannot advertise your way out of that. Familiarity is built through contact, not through impressions. The single strongest predictor of propensity to consider service is familiarity with the military, built through encounters in ordinary life. That is what the Executrek demonstrated at the employer level. It is what the Snowbirds demonstrate at national scale.

The Snowbirds cost approximately $4.3 million per year to operate. Over fifty-five years, they put the CAF in front of more than 140 million people, at air shows from the Far North to Mexico, in communities that had no other regular point of contact with the military. That is a pool-maintenance function. It does not produce enlistments in a fiscal quarter. Over time, it produces a population that has a basis on which to consider service. Grounding the team for a decade without replacing that function makes the pool smaller.

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Here is something that gets missed in the Snowbirds debate: the CAF is not absent from Canadian communities. It is present constantly in domestic missions.

Between 2023 and 2025, CAF units deployed repeatedly under Operation LENTUS in response to domestic disasters, including floods and wildfires. In 2023 alone, the CAF assisted civil authorities in six provinces and territories, deploying more than 2,100 members for 131 consecutive days. During the pandemic, under Operations LASER and VECTOR, the CAF responded to 118 provincial and territorial requests for assistance directly related to COVID-19. Defence officials and analysts have also warned that some provinces are now requesting CAF assistance before storms hit.

The military shows up. It does the work. Then it goes back to base. No parade, no public acknowledgement, no civic moment at which the community gets to say, “These people came from here and came back—thank you for your service.” The infrastructure that would convert that operational presence into social connection has been dismantled over thirty years, and the result is that most Canadians do not know the CAF was in their community, even when it was.

That is a pool problem. The teenager who watched CAF members fight a wildfire in her town and then watched them leave is a potential recruit. That encounter could matter. Without the civic infrastructure to make it stick, it evaporates.

Britain has understood this differently. The United Kingdom maintains 1,190 military band personnel, spends £9.6 million annually on military music, and treats regimental presence at civic occasions as a defence policy investment. The Edinburgh Military Tattoo draws over 200,000 attendees a year. Those investments sustain the relationship between the military and the society it recruits from. Canada has no equivalent framework.

The 2022 CAF reconstitution directive explicitly ordered ceremonial tasks reduced and parades minimized. The logic was that soldiers should be training, not parading. That logic is understandable. It treats pool building as a distraction from force building, when the two are connected.

Visibility does not have to mean parades. It means making the CAF present in forms that connect to the lives and interests of the Canadians it needs to reach.

It looks like drone light shows over city waterfronts on Victoria Day and Canada Day, demonstrating to engineers and coders and robotics hobbyists that the CAF works with the technology they care about. The war in Ukraine has made the skills profile of the modern military specific: drone operators, systems engineers, IT specialists, and field mechanics are the most sought-after recruits in the most advanced militaries in the world. Canada needs those people, and they are not coming from military families. They need to see themselves in the institution before they will consider it.

It looks like army engineers building infrastructure in communities that need it, demonstrating that the CAF is composed of tradespeople doing real work in the real world.

It looks like the men and women who fought wildfires in Alberta and British Columbia, who evacuated communities in Manitoba and Newfoundland, who ran search-and-rescue operations across the country, marching through the streets of those same communities, with their neighbours lining the road. These people showed up when things went wrong. Their communities deserve the chance to say so, and that public acknowledgement is also how a young person watching from the sidewalk begins to think, That institution belongs to people like me.

To reach its volume targets in 2025/26, the CAF dropped its aptitude test from the application process for dozens of jobs and relaxed medical screening criteria. According to reporting on a leaked internal memo from the Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit School, basic training pass rates fell to 77 percent, from 85 percent the year before. The proportion of candidates requiring multiple attempts to graduate jumped to nearly 15 percent, almost double the prior year.

This is what happens when the pool is narrow and the pressure to hit volume targets is high. The system lowers the bar because it does not have enough qualified candidates choosing to apply.

The pipeline improvements the CAF has made are real, and they matter. Processing times are down. Enrolment hit a thirty-year high. An online portal is replacing a paper system that made the process unnecessarily difficult. This is good work, and it should continue.

But the pipeline and the pool are different problems, and the CAF’s published recruiting strategy addresses one in considerable detail while barely acknowledging the other. There is a detailed plan for how to process applications faster. There is no equivalent plan for how Canada intends to increase the proportion of its population that actively considers military service as a career option. No framework for civic–military engagement. No stated strategy for growing the pool beyond the military families that currently produce the majority of candidates. No answer to the question that the US experience makes urgent: What do you do when 80 percent of your recruits come from the same shrinking family pool?

The Snowbirds contributed to that pool for fifty-five years. Their stand-down is reasonable given the state of the Tutor fleet. The gap until the early 2030s is not reasonable to leave unaddressed. The Royal Canadian Air Force says it will maintain air show presence with other aircraft during the transition. That is a start, and it is not sufficient.

The Carney government has made a serious financial commitment to rebuilding the CAF. The investment is welcome and necessary. But money spent on equipment and pay does not automatically produce the recruits needed to operate that equipment. Recruits come from a population that has decided the CAF has something to do with them. Right now, too few Canadians have made that decision, and the CAF has no visible strategy for changing it.

That is the question the Snowbirds debate should force into the open. Not just: What aircraft replaces the Tutor? But: What is the plan for increasing the pool? How does Canada grow the number of people who see the CAF as a place for someone like them? What replaces the civic–military contact that has been quietly disappearing for thirty years?

Those questions do not have answers in any current DND document I’ve seen. They should.

Adapted from “The Canadian Military Is Quietly Disappearing from Canadian Life” by B. E. Rybak (Substack). Reprinted with permission of the author.