After announcing several relaxations to promote recruitment in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), Federal Defense Minister Bill Blair assures that the new measures are already starting to bear fruit.
“We saw an increase of nearly 1,000 people on reserves. It’s significant. There is also an increase in the number of regular members in service,” said the minister, without specifying their number.
Minister Blair, who is also the former chief of the Toronto Police Service, was in Montreal to participate in a panel of the Council on International Relations of Montreal (CORIM) alongside the Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology. Industry, François-Philippe Champagne.
“I am absolutely convinced that we can rebuild the strength of the Canadian Armed Forces,” he attested to the Duty following the event. Recent progress is “only the beginning” of this recovery, after years of shortages, he said.
At the start of the year, however, Mr Blair described recruitment difficulties as a “death spiral”, lamenting that more people were leaving the army than were joining. Approximately 15,000 CAF positions are still vacant today, or 16% of the workforce.
To remedy this, the update of Canada’s defense policy, announced last month, therefore provided for more flexible measures to accelerate recruitment, such as the creation of a probationary period, a reduction in medical requirements and a reduction delays in obtaining security authorizations.
“It is important that checks are carried out on people we recruit into roles that require high levels of security, but we are not required to do this on day one, or before someone even applies,” advances the minister.
In 2022, the CAF opened its doors to permanent residents in the hope of breathing new life into recruitment. But only a handful of the 21,000 applicants were accepted in this first year of eligibility.
The minister admits that current recruitment processes are insufficient for needs. “Let’s get them in, let’s get them through basic training and give them a chance to hang in there,” he insists.
Investments in health care, housing and child care for military personnel were also announced in the latest defense policy update to support member retention.
A laudable goal
As part of its defense policy update, Ottawa also announced that billions of dollars in future investments will increase military spending from the current 1.33% of GDP to 1.76% in 2029-2030 – still too little to reach the famous NATO target.
In 2014, Alliance leaders agreed that each member should spend 2% of its GDP on defense in order, among other things, to ensure operational readiness for all.
In a recent speech to the Canadian World Affairs Institute, Minister Blair admitted that it was difficult to convince his cabinet colleagues to invest and that the 2% target was a laudable goal.
Although no date has been set for reaching the target, the minister defends himself by noting that the investments planned in the defense policy update — which provides for $8.1 billion over the next five years and 73 billion over the next 20 years — will bring us closer.
“We really needed to make a compelling case to Canadians about why these investments were necessary and what the benefits were.” Frankly, I have been very pleased with the support we have received from Canadians and our government,” he says.
Much of the spending planned in the update is after the 2025 federal election.