Like every army ever, the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) have always been predominantly male. And, as a country with a majority of the population being of European descent, its members have been predominantly white. These facts should be uncontroversial.

But unlike every army ever, the CAF is using the identities of its historic membership to promote an ethos of guilt and shame within the institution. This isn’t fixing the present recruitment crisis and it’s doubtful that it ever will — but this approach has the firm support of scholarly military voices, the latest example coming to us from Paul Mitchell, a defence studies professor at the Canadian Forces College.

“The idea that our armed forces are ‘too woke’ misunderstands efforts to improve the work environment for historically underrepresented groups,” Mitchell wrote this week for the Conversation. He argued that recruitment is falling among white males, and because the visible minority population is increasing, the military needs to turn its eyes elsewhere.

He was, in part, coming to the defence of the Canadian Military Journal which was criticized for its ideological slant last month. The journal’s summer issue was chock-full of identity-politic diatribes. In one article on the military’s festering “whiteness” problem, an author confirmed systemic racism was indeed happening based on a few qualitative interviews with non-white service members analyzed through the lens of racial, anti-western philosophy.