Runaway Future

By now everyone’s heard of the new Canadian Forces advertisements that don’t depict the usual smiling cadets driving tanks in parades and giving fisherman blankets on the open seas. The new ads caused a bit of a hubbub, because they display realistic situations that our Canadian Forces can see themselves in today, namely missions in Afghanistan, as well as grittier looks at the happy cheery stuff like rescuing people on the ocean, fighting forest fires and floods. (on a side note, since all the noise has been made, it seems they show the “Rescue” ad a helluva lot more frequently than the “Combat” ad). The NDP (who else) called it war-mongering, because obviously we should not have to deal with what our Forces actually do (something the country is having a hard time getting over already with our tragic losses of young men and women in Afghanistan). For someone like me, who’s probably a lot closer to the target audience for these ads then a stuffy middle-age MP (NDP or not), I respect the idea that it provides what I would assume is a lot closer representation of what service is than the happy cheery ads of the past.

Which brings us back to the beginning, I’ve seen a bunch of web advertisements for the Canadian Forces over the past week and they’re all using the old slogan “Strong, Proud, Today’s Canadian Forces”. So is this just a case where they’ve been unable or slow to deploy the new “Fight” campaign to all forms of media, or are the Canadian Forces backing down a bit on their new image?