What happens to a country when its military can no longer defend it? That is the question Canadians should be asking right now. The Canadian Armed Forces (caf) is facing an existential crisis.

Chief of Defense Staff Gen. Wayne Erye issued an order to halt all nonessential activities in order to focus on military recruitment and retention. The caf is 10,000 recruits short, which handicaps the forces from being able to launch a large-scale operation. That amounts to 10 percent of military positions being vacant. Eyre said: “Owing to personnel and staffing levels that have been compounded by the caf’s heavy commitment to operations, the negative effects of the covid-19 pandemic and a culture crisis, National Defense continues to lose its ability to deliver and sustain concurrent operations at the scope and scale necessary.”

Besides sending small detachments overseas, deployments to help with weather disasters and covid-19 vaccine programs mean the caf could not defend the country on a large scale due to manpower shortages. Even in 2019, former Chief of Defense Staff Johnathan Vance said the caf was “being pushed to the limit responding to an increasing number of climate-related events.” If the caf can’t handle climate change, how could it fight a real enemy?

The caf is not only facing a recruitment crisis: procurement, obsolete equipment, identity, culture, leadership and morale are all debilitating the forces. The Canadian Press wrote: “To that end, the order directs commanders to prioritize fully staffing recruiting centers and training schools and calls for a complete reassessment of the military’s current structure and composition.” This crisis is ushering in a complete restructuring of the force. The caf is about to be transformed.

How did Canada become the first major Western nation to have a military that can’t fulfill its primary reason for existence? There are a myriad of factors at play, but the most important to realize is that it was a deliberate agenda to collapse the Canadian Armed Forces.

Force in Crisis

The issues confronting the caf have been brewing for decades. Several policy decisions by Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the 1970s sent the caf reeling. The policy of integration severed the three branches from their historic traditions, while the introduction of national health care condemned the caf to fiscal obscurity: Health care gets more votes than defense in Canada.

The underfunding of the caf is no secret. Senate committees have been seeking to increase spending for years, but to no effect. Even when the Trudeau government increases spending, billions of dollars are wasted in underspending. Since 2008, the Department of National Defense has failed to spend $9.9 billion. What’s the root cause of the problem? Canada’s broken procurement system.

Richard Shimooka, a senior fellow at the Macdonald Laurier Institute, said Canada has the “worst military procurement system in the Western world.” Nearly 70 percent of projects are not delivered on time, delays in major programs last years, and costs often become inflated. “[T]he vast majority of Canada’s military procurements involve what is known as ‘off the shelf’ purchases,” wrote Shimooka. “Such programs should be straightforward, as all of the risks involved in technological development are resolved. Nevertheless, Canada frequently is unable to execute even this basic level of competence.” This has left the caf without the most basic of equipment needed for defense. Shimooka continued:

The Canadian Surface Combatant program to replace the Halifax frigates is a good example. The government purchased an off-the-shelf design—the bae Systems Type 26 frigate—to avoid much of the initial development work. Nevertheless, the project program costs nearly doubled from the early estimates of $14 billion to $30 billion, at a cost that rivaled a clean-sheet development program. Similarly, Canada’s fighter replacement program will have gone over for 16 years under the present government’s timeline. Most countries required only two to four years to select the F-35 (if they ran a competition at all).

What’s the cause of this incompetence? In part, the bureaucratic labyrinth of the Canadian government. Nine governmental bodies are involved in procuring items for defense: Department of National Defense; Public Services and Procurement Canada; Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada; the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat; Department of Finance; the Department of Fisheries and Oceans; the Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development; and the Privy Council Office. The agency infighting, wasted administrative costs and poor government policy have created a national security crisis.

Yet when Prime Minister Trudeau decides to buy equipment for Ukraine, it is done overnight. The Canadian government announced it is buying a $406 million surface-to-air missile defense system from the United States to donate to Ukraine. Yet the caf has been without a similar system since 2012. A procurement process has started for a replacement, but as ctv News notes: “That $1 billion ‘ground-based air defense’ project is expected to deliver a variety of capabilities to defend against different threats. Yet it isn’t scheduled to deliver anything to the Army until at least 2027.” The caf is also giving away 200 armored vehicles to Ukraine—vehicles that its under-equipped force needs.

Why can Trudeau buy weapons for the Ukrainian Army but not the caf? Some of it is systemic, bureaucratic failure, and part of it is the radical-left government taking advantage of the incompetence to achieve its own agenda.

Yet the crisis being used to the greatest effect is the explosion of sexual assault allegations.

Enemy Within

The August 2021 cover of Maclean’s magazine headlined “The Enemy Within.” The issue covered the shocking and pervasive culture of sexual assault within the caf. The most senior ranks of the armed forces have been rocked with allegations, many being forced to resign even when acquitted of wrongdoing. A massive dearth has developed in the junior ranks as unqualified and inexperienced officers are promoted to fill in the gaps. The Trumpet reported on these events in a May 2022 article titled “Trudeau Is Purging the Canadian Military.”

In July 2021, Maclean’s wrote “The War Inside the Canadian Armed Forces.” Sexual assault has been a well-documented problem in the caf since the 1990s. Maclean’s paints a disturbing picture of toxic masculinity as the hidden enemy within the caf that is slowly destroying it.

The result of this crisis has been a culture change spearheaded by the radical left. General Erye announced: “Culture change will remain the top departmental priority throughout the reconstitution process. This endeavor will require significant resources and a willingness to embrace recommendations from external review authorities.”

This culture change is the Trojan horse for a Communist revolution in the caf. The major changes implemented are bringing in transgenderism, critical race theory, a relaxed dress code, removing British military traditions, and a restructuring of the leadership. White Canadians have been labeled as a symptom of systemic racism. Are these initiatives responsible for the recruitment crisis?

The widespread sexual assault definitely needs to be addressed and fixed; however, this crisis is being used by radical-left leaders to effect their own agenda. An enemy within Canada is destroying the caf, but it isn’t toxic masculinity. A war is being fought over the fate of Canada and the caf, but it’s not what you think.

The real enemy within is Canada’s own radical-left leaders.

The Trumpet has long warned about and documented a prophesied Communist infiltration of Western nations. The late Herbert W. Armstrong began warning about this attack in the 1950s. He said that the anti-God, anti-Bible, anti-capitalist Communists would subtly infiltrate all levels of government in order to effect a cultural change, a transformation. When the lens of Bible prophecy is added, the cause of this crisis becomes clearer. Mr. Armstrong wrote in 1956: “[Communism is] a kind of warfare we don’t understand, or know how to cope with. It uses every diabolical means to weaken us from within, sapping our strength, perverting our morals … weakening our industrial and economic power, demoralizing our armed forces, and finally, after such infiltration, overthrowing our government by force and violence!”

This is the motivation behind what is happening in the caf. Not all leaders are Communists, but many in top positions are. Mr. Armstrong explained in a 1968 Plain Truth: “It injects trained Communists into many movements and societies—themselves not Communist—and subtly influences them into moves and actions that secretly are Communist-planned and directed. Yet the officers, and most members of such organizations are not, themselves, Communist and do not realize they are being used.” The culture change in the caf, and its radical reorganization, is following this pattern.

It is not just the Communist infiltration causing the degradation of the caf. The widespread sexual assaults are a result of sin in society and a lack of character. Isaiah 1:5 calls our societies sick from head to toe. Isaiah 3:1-11 prophesied that God would remove all strong male leaders, including those in the military, due to national sins. Greed and complacency has eroded away our military spirit over several generations. All these forces are being harassed by the radical left to effect their cultural change.

What is the goal of this cultural change? A Communist dictatorship. The only way for this radical-left revolution to succeed is for either the Army to be neutralized as a threat or be brought into ideological alignment. This is the crossroads the caf is at right now.

Canada is not the only place this is happening. More significantly, the same decline is being spearheaded in the United States. This deliberate attack is fundamentally changing the country. The only way to understand this war is to understand Bible prophecy.

To learn more about this life-changing knowledge, please read The United States and Britain in Prophecy and America Under Attack.