By: Stephanie Shapiro
Prime Minister Mark Carney announced in the spring of 2025 that Canada would begin a massive rebuilding of the Canadian Armed Forces. After years of underinvestment, the government is talking seriously about defence spending, recruitment and retention, procurement and what capabilities Canada will need in an increasingly dangerous world. But today, on Military Family Appreciation Day, another part of Canada’s defence infrastructure deserves our attention: the families behind the people who serve.
When we talk about rebuilding the Canadian Armed Forces, the conversation understandably focuses on ships, aircraft, weapons and ammunition, and technology. And while it is clearly vital to invest in all those things, militaries are ultimately made up of people, and those people don’t serve in isolation. Behind a CAF member may be a spouse trying to maintain a career through repeated moves, a child starting at another new school, or a family trying to find a doctor after being posted to a province where accessing health-care providers is difficult. Of course, these not challenges that are unique to military families, but military life can compound them. Canadians should expect that their governments will do their best to help military families as they serve our country.
And it is possible to do better. Consider something as basic as access to a family doctor. Millions of Canadians are struggling to find care, and military families don’t expect to be exempt from that reality. But there is an important distinction that should not be ignored: most Canadians aren’t repeatedly required by their employer to move between provinces, and therefore, in and out of provincially regulated systems. A military family can spend years finding a family physician in one province, only to receive a new posting and have to start the process again in another one. The same can happen with mental-health care, specialists and other supports.
It’s not just health care. Because of how our system is set up, a posting to another province can mean a military spouse must navigate a new regulator, pay additional fees, and wait for authorization before getting a job, even when they are already licensed and in good standing elsewhere in Canada. Professional credentials are generally supposed to be portable under Canada’s labour-mobility rules, but recognition is still not always immediate or automatic. Military families do not choose when or where they are posted, and they should not lose months of income to delays by provincial licensing systems. Military families accept that mobility is part of military life, but they shouldn’t have to accept unnecessary barriers created by systems that were never designed around that mobility. This isn’t something that occurs once or twice, either; it can happen every couple of years, with some moving 10-15 times throughout their careers.
It’s easy to see these as small issues, but they’re bigger than family policy. Challenges such as these affect military readiness. Canada is trying to recruit more people into the armed forces and, critically, convince experienced members to stay. How much harder are we making military service because of its impact on families? How much easier would it be to recruit and keep personnel if they weren’t as worried about the toll their job took on their loved ones?
A CAF member worried about their family at home doesn’t leave those concerns behind when they put on the uniform, and a member deciding whether to remain in the Forces isn’t making that decision in isolation. If Canada is serious about recruitment and retention, it cannot treat the quality of military family life as peripheral to defence policy. That is why this week in Ottawa, Together We Stand, along with military family members, stood up and proposed real, practical steps governments can take.
First, Canada needs to make health care more portable for military families. This means Ottawa working with the provinces and territories to develop a national health-care-access framework for military families, so that a posting doesn’t routinely send them back to the beginning of the line for primary care, mental-health services and other essential supports. This isn’t about creating a health-care system separate from the one every other Canadian uses, but about recognizing the unique circumstances of families moved across provincial boundaries because of military service and developing better continuity-of-care mechanisms. Recently, when I was with the wife of a serving military member, she told me about how her husband’s posting changed while she was pregnant with twins. When they got to their new city, she faced a medical emergency, and she had no doctor.
Second, Canada needs to develop a Military Family Mobility Guarantee so that when the military requires a family to move, the financial and administrative penalties that accompany that move are reduced. That means faster recognition of professional credentials for military spouses, better relocation assistance, improved access to child care at a new posting, and employment supports that allow spouses to maintain careers through repeated moves.
Finally, we need to broaden the way Canada thinks about defence readiness. While we measure personnel, equipment, and capabilities, we should also measure whether military families can access health care, housing, and child care; whether spouses can maintain employment; and whether families can access the mental-health supports they need. Those indicators should be publicly reported and incorporated into Canada’s broader defence readiness and retention strategy, because if family instability contributes to someone leaving the Armed Forces, that isn’t simply a family issue.
In an increasingly unstable world, Canada is asking more of its armed forces. We are asking them to rebuild depleted capabilities, respond to an alarmingly unstable international environment and to prepare for challenges we may not yet be able to predict. That makes this exactly the moment to ask whether we are doing enough for the people who make that service possible.
Military families are extraordinarily resilient, but that resilience should justify ignoring avoidable barriers their own government puts in their way. On Military Family Appreciation Day, we must show it through action. Canada cannot modernize its military without modernizing military life. If we want a Canadian Armed Forces capable of protecting this country for decades to come, we need to recognize that strong military families aren’t separate from military readiness, they are part of it.
Stephanie Shapiro is the chief operations officer of Together We Stand, which serves Canada’s military families by honouring their contribution to our country, supporting families in need of a hand-up, and educating the civilian population about the pivotal role these families play in the country’s safety and security
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Colwood BC provides the model for dependent health care in the military. When Colwood was losing doctors the mayor didn’t sit back and wait for doctors to decide to move to Colwood and open a practise. He and council decided to,open a city clinic and hire the necessary doctors. The city does the administration and bills the province. The doctors are not bothered by administrating a practise, they simply provide health care to their patients.
It is my view, provided by 26 years of moving a family 10 times, literally from coast to coast and stops in between, that this is a perfect model for bases in Canada. They could establish Dependent Health Clinics, hire doctors and administrators to run the clinic and treat dependents.
We need new thinking. This is easier and requires far less high level meetings and committees than trying to change the system through the various levels of government bureaucracy. The Surgeon-General could oversee the establishment of such clinics across all installations as it would work on even smaller installations.
P.S. Having such clinics would also make it easier to transfer medical records between clinics after postings.
This is a great article. Current military posting system was designed when (a) military spouses didn’t work (b) health care was easily and quickly accessible “off the shelf” in all provinces. Need to design a system that works for today’s world where these aren’t true.