(OTTAWA) The Canadian Armed Forces are facing a growing personnel shortage: New figures reveal that recruiting and training have not kept pace with army expansion plans, leaving more than 12,000 vacant jobs.
Posted yesterday at 5:50 p.m.
The figures provided to The Canadian Press document recent warnings from the Chief of the Defense Staff, General Wayne Eyre, and other senior military officers about the state of the Canadian military, which is increasingly more in demand, both at home and abroad.
The General Staff has blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for the decline in recruiting and training new service members, but an analyst suggests the recent military sexual misconduct scandal has also taken its toll on the military. chapter of vocations.
“The Canadian military has had a pretty bad year in terms of reputation among the population, and I imagine that has had a negative impact – and not only on the number of women who want to enlist,” said the president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, David Perry.
Whereas the Armed Forces previously wanted to be able to count on 68,000 soldiers in the regular force and 29,000 reservists at all times, the Liberal government authorized it to raise these figures to 71,500 and 30,000, respectively – that is to say 4,500 additional members.
This expansion is seen as essential to ensuring the military is ready to defend against growing global instability in Europe and Asia, as well as emerging threats in space, on the internet and at home – such as natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Yet while the military is expected to have added 4,500 personnel, its ranks have instead shrunk by more than 700 personnel since the end of 2020. Overall, the Canadian military currently needs more than 6,750 personnel in the regular force and nearly 5,500 additional reservists.
And those numbers could rise as the military grapples with whether to fire up to 900 soldiers who disobeyed Chief of Staff General Wayne Eyre’s order to get vaccinated.
Worse still, figures show that more than 10,000 regular force members are currently unavailable for service because they are not properly trained or are ill or injured.
A “fragile” force
General Eyre recently acknowledged that the Canadian Armed Forces are “fragile” as COVID-19 imposed restrictions on recruiting and training at a time when the military was facing increasing demands in Canada and abroad. foreigner.
These include requests for support for provincial vaccination campaigns, the provision of emergency aid in response to natural disasters and the continuation of military operations in Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. .
The Royal Canadian Air Force, for its part, is struggling with a shortage of pilots and technicians, while the commander of the Royal Canadian Navy, Vice-Admiral Craig Baines, says the army needs 1,000 sailors additional full-time staff to outfit its new fleet of ships.
While General Eyre spoke of a post-pandemic regrouping and rebuilding of the army, Professor Perry believes there will be long-term effects, as the current recruiting and training system is designed to only accept only a certain number of recruits at a time.
There will also be differences in the experience levels of the military, he said, which will make it much more difficult to manage human resources.
“You can’t just flip the switch and eradicate this deficit all at once in a year,” Professor Perry said. It’s going to take a lot of time. »