A former Lieutenant-General of the Canadian Armed Forces stated that the military’s recruitment issues stem from targeting an unsuitable demographic.
A recently leaked internal report obtained by CBC News found the CAF’s retention rate of experienced soldiers, sailors, and aircrew plummeted with time; new recruits are also quick to leave.
The Trudeau government tasked the CAF with finding $810 million in savings that could be reallocated for equipment procurement last year which resulted in the defunding of a department designed to innovate ways to keep personnel.
The DND was also expected to find an additional $851 million in savings for the 2025-26 budget year and $907 million thereafter.
“The highest attrition rates within the CAF are observed among its lowest ranks and newest members,” reads the report. During the 2023-24 fiscal year, 9.4 per cent of newly enrolled members quit, with new members citing training days and difficulty adjusting to military life.
Former lieutenant-general Michel Maisonneuve said he’s aware of cases where people are leaving as early as one week after recruitment, while others wait as long as two years to receive a training date.
Maisonneuve sympathizes with those frustrated with prioritizing culture over pragmatic operational needs, saying the CAF has been simply trying to “recruit the wrong people.”
“Using the armed forces as a social experiment is not the way to improve recruitment. They’re recruiting people who have blue hair, piercings and nail polish. As soon as they’re told, ‘dirtbag, get down and give me 20.’ They say ‘I can’t do that’ and they want to leave,” Maisonneuve told True North.
The CAF is currently facing a shortage of up to 14,000 qualified personnel in both the regular and reserve forces.
The military published a strategy document in 2022 to address certain retention issues, which found that “there is a perception leadership is prioritizing culture change over critical operational needs like ammunition and equipment.”
“The flip side of the coin when it comes to hiring on a DEI basis is that the real men and women warriors will be disgusted and also leave.”
Additionally, the report found that little was being done to retain highly experienced members who were close to retirement and could have been incentivized to stay.
“Many have had multiple geographic postings, and feel ‘tired and broken,'” it said. “It was noted that pension-eligible members have done their part to serve the country, and therefore, there are no strong attempts made to retain them.”
Maisonneuve agreed, saying it’s the instructors, technicians and pilots who leave larger shoes to fill when they go.
“It’s all guys that took 15 years to get to where they are, but they’re the ones leaving now,” he said. “So the training system is broken because of those who do the training; many have left.”
Another issue Maisonneuvenoted is the military equipment and training facilities themselves, which are often run down and lag behind what is available today.
“Kids these days, young men and women are very tech savvy, and so when they join the military and go to bases where they wind up operating eighties equipment and use nineties overhead projectors for slides, it’s disheartening.”
“If you knew that you were going to eventually fly an F-35, my goodness, that would be exciting. If you knew you’d be operating the best electronic warfare equipment…but we don’t have that stuff.”
Maisonneuve said that even if the CAF were to acquire the latest model tank, for example, there would still be the problem of not having a technician capable of fixing it.
“It’s a huge crisis, and we seem to be trying to run the same type of recruiting that we’ve always done, as opposed to taking a couple of operational units and turning them into recruiting units. We need to have a new way of looking at things,” he said.
“We have a new minister of national defence now, and I hope he comes out and says, ‘hey, young people, you want to serve your country? You want satisfaction in life? Join the armed forces and help us fix this problem and our country.’”