The Canadian Armed Forces is struggling to retain new recruits
Not only is Canada’s Armed Forces struggling to get recruits in the door, but many of those who do give military life a whirl are deciding it’s not for them.
Driving the news: A leaked report found that many new Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) recruits are quickly hitting the bricks after growing fed up with long delays and spells of underemployment.
- Nearly 10 per cent of fresh CAF recruits quit in the 2023-24 fiscal year, with some reporting waits of more than 200 days to start training.
Why it matters: Like trying to fill a leaky bucket, it will be difficult for the CAF to solve its personnel shortage if it can’t keep its new recruits — more worryingly, the military’s long-standing retention problems may point to deeper dysfunction in the organization.
- The retention issue, for example, was already addressed in a lengthy report three years ago by then-chief of the Defence Staff Wayne Erye, but its recommendations have largely gone unimplemented.
- The Department of Defence also recently rejected a plan to give key staff retention bonuses and shuttered an office tasked with improving retention.
Bottom line: Finding $20 billion to hit NATO’s two per cent defence spending target in the next two years may be the easy part — fixing the military’s process issues and bottlenecks that make it difficult to spend that money effectively could be a thornier problem.
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