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% 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 2% 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.—TS