He’s 51, a councillor and a skateboarding graffiti artist: Meet one of Canada’s newest army recruits

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Sterling Downey, 51, a long-serving city councillor and former deputy mayor of Montreal who is soon to commence basic infantry training after recently enlisting with the Canadian Forces, came to this unusual plan while driving through Philadelphia on the way to Virginia Beach on Memorial Day weekend.

Ultimately, in his heart, joining the Reserve Force as a private while keeping his day job in elected city politics is an effort to honour and reconnect with his late father Ken, a Second World War veteran.

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But in the moment, it was inspired by seeing all the banners hoisted in the American cities and towns he passed through, publicly honouring war dead.

“There were banners everywhere and every person on those banners was younger than me,” Downey said in an interview.

He was struck that American contemporary veterans and fallen soldiers are so young. They reminded him less of himself and more of his father, who lied about his age to enlist with the navy, then returned from a stint hunting German U-boats on a warship as a young man barely in his 20s. Unlike in Canada, where veterans tend to live in the public imagination as honourable grandpas, in Middle America their young faces were plastered over main streets, draped in bunting.

“We don’t do that,” Downey said.

So this white-bearded middle-aged man, a father to a young boy never mind an elected office holder, decided he was going to join the army. He took his oath last month at a swearing-in ceremony with the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada, and was touched to know his father once recited the same words. He has started his training, which so far involves learning military standards, ethics, values, organization, protocol, drill, as well as the physical training of running sandbags, deadlifting poles, and dragging 175-pound weights around.

“I can give a decade of service to the Canadian Armed Forces as a reservist,” he said. “Why wouldn’t I do it?”

Even if there is a good answer to that question, Downey does not entertain it. He is a vibrant character, previously best known as deputy to Montreal’s first woman mayor Valérie Plante, and as a skateboarding graffiti artist and leader of Montreal’s Under Pressure graffiti art festival, which is also slightly outside the normal spectrum of things for men of a certain age. (He is not even the oldest new recruit in his group, however.)

Downey’s advocacy for the military has grown in recent years, including efforts to secure sustainable operating funds for the National Field of Honour, a military cemetery in Pointe-Claire; a public outreach video promoting the Remembrance Day poppy; service with veterans hospitals and the Legion; and now his own enlistment.

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“I tend to do everything backwards, and I tend to do everything in a difficult way,” he said.

This winter, he will do the customary eight weeks of basic training, keeping up with soldier recruits half his age. He expects to pass. He figures an injury might deter him, but he’s determined, and has already won a technical appeal over a minor medical issue that caused a delay. He’s not going to quit, and he’s not going to get kicked out. “There’s not a lot that’s going to stop me from getting through this,” he said.

He was reluctant to talk in too much detail about his training because it is not yet complete, and he declined to have his picture taken in a uniform he feels he has not yet formally earned.

“I’m not doing this for attention, This isn’t a circus show,” he said.

But the eager pride is clear in his voice as he describes wanting to honour his father, and not just his father’s service to Canada, but also his service as a father to Sterling himself.

“It’s my responsibility to do that, and to give him that peace,” he said. “I was a shitty kid, as most kids can be.”

He was anti-authoritarian, and though he checked out a couple of high school cadet programs, he never liked it much, especially the uniforms and the orders. He preferred to spend time skateboarding in parks as a youthful renegade, which drove him apart from his disciplinarian father. Ken Downey died aged 76 in 1996, but Sterling is still trying to close that gap.

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“At 51, I crave more organization, more discipline,” he said. “It’s going to make me a better person, more organized, disciplined. It’ll make me a better communicator, and better father.”

His enlistment is also public outreach, even a form of civic-minded politics. He hopes to promote the services the Forces provide to the people who might follow him into the ranks, not just combat readiness, he emphasized, but emergency response to forest fires, ice storms, pandemic support. He is also keen to promote the hiring of reservists by civilian employers, which requires flexible leave policies of a sort he fought for in the city of Montreal.

“I could be called into duty. It could very much happen, and it’s something I have to be very well aware of, very conscious of, and well prepared for,” he said.

He does not know whether his father would have wanted him to join the military, but he can live with that uncertainty.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he said. “But at the same time, I think he would have been proud of my reasons for doing it. I think at 51 he would think, ‘You’re ready for this now.’”

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