This is something Canada must start to solve ASAP.
At a time when global threats are rising, Canada is in the midst of a military recruiting crisis.
The situation is so dire that even Defence Minister Bill Blair refers to it as a ‘death spiral‘:
“If what you have been doing for decades is no longer working for you, you can’t just keep doing it,” he told Global News parliamentary bureau chief and The West Block host Mercedes Stephenson, who moderated a question-and-answer period with Blair.
“Over the past three years, more people have left than have entered. That is, frankly, a death spiral for the Canadian Armed Forces. We cannot afford to continue at that pace. We’ve got to do something differently.”
Canada must start to address this immediately. Our country needs a military buildup, which requires a significant increase in weapon procurement. Yet, those weapons won’t matter much if we don’t have people to use them.
So, how can we stop the recruiting death spiral?
How can we start rebuilding the CAF to a reasonable level?
Well, let’s start by looking at where things stand now:
According to the Canadian Government, Canada is short of our already-low recruiting targets:
“As outlined in Strong, Secure, Engaged, the authorized target strength of the CAF regular force is 71,500, and that of the reserve force is 30,000.
National Defence’s current force strength is approximately 63,000 Regular Force and 22,000 Reserve Force members, approximately 16,500 short of our authorized strength.
As of 30 September 2023, the Trained Effective Strength of the Regular Force is 52,707 or about 83% of our Primary Reserve.
This represents members who have reached Operational Functional Point (OFP), meaning they are fully trained and ready for deployment at any time.”
Contrast this to Poland, one of Canada’s NATO allies and a country that takes national defence seriously.
Poland has 128,000 active personnel, and 36,000 territorial defence forces. Basically, they double Canada’s current capability, and Poland is rapidly expanding their defence spending, buying up seemingly every weapon system they can. Poland also does this despite having a lower per capita GDP than Canada, meaning higher military spending imposes a proportionally higher burden on Poland than it would on our country.
And Poland provides an example of the first step we should take to start reversing the ‘death spiral’:
Buy modern equipment
This may seem paradoxical. We need to recruit more people so the equipment we buy doesn’t languish in storage. So why would buying be related to recruitment? The issue here is that for people to want to sign up in larger numbers, there must be confidence that Canada is equipping our men and women in uniform with the best of the best. Canada’s armed forces are widely seen as underequipped, which is not the reputation we want to have.
Imagine watching online footage of soldiers getting taken out by drones, hearing about the fact that China and Russia are mass-producing military drones, and then reading the following (article from November of 2024):
“First-person-view drones have transformed the modern battlefield, but the Canadian military has confirmed it has no plans to buy the low-cost aerial vehicles.”
This is unacceptable. If we want people to join the CAF, we need Canadians to be confident that our troops will be the best equipped in the world. By ramping up the procurement of drones, tanks, fighter jets, and more, the government would send a positive message that would boost recruitment efforts.
Show future CAF members they will be taken care of
People know that joining the military can be dangerous. But that doesn’t mean the government should ever treat those in the CAF as disposable. The attitude should be just the opposite. Those willing to put their lives on the line for the freedom and security of the Canadian People should be given the best accommodations and the best treatment. To that end, the government must invest in rebuilding dilapidated military housing, modernizing military bases and building new ones, and strengthening Veterans’ healthcare. If we want people to serve our country, then our country must also make clear it will serve them.
Note, after posting this on Twitter, @NavyDistinction made the following point, which is important to add:
Appeal to those who love Canada
What do I mean by this?
I mean that for quite some time, the government has undermined the ideological pillars of patriotism in Canada.
This government has called Canada a ‘genocidal country,’ has emphasized Canada’s ‘convening power’ over tangible military strength, has shown far too much tolerance for anti-Western & anti-Semitic radicals who oppose Canada’s core Western Values, and has even demonized the idea of Canada having a core identity, with the Prime Minister running a ‘post-national-state’ experiment that – to put it mildly – hasn’t worked out.
Who did the government think that would appeal to?
How can a government undermine the ideological foundations of Canada (one of the most open, free, peaceful, and prosperous nations on Earth), and then expect people to sign up to defend that same nation?
This was incredibly short-sighted, given that the Canadians most likely to join the CAF are – unsurprisingly – people who are very patriotic. Over and over again, the government seemed to almost deliberately demoralize those most likely to want to serve our nation.
That must change.
Canada should never be a country that denies our errors. One of our strengths is our recognition of the mistakes of the past and our desire to learn from those mistakes and constantly improve. That said, we should also be immensely proud of what we have built, and proud of our historical roots in Western Civilization. While we are struggling right now, Canada is still a nation that brought people together from around the world to unite around a shared love of freedom. We are still a nation that fought for what was right in multiple wars. We are still a nation that has long stood with our allies and helped brave people around the world resist tyrants. And for all our current issues, we are still a nation that can bring about change peacefully at the ballot box.
All of us – every Canadian – are the shared inheritors and builders of something special, and if we want people to stand up in defence of our nation, we should be unafraid to say so.
As I noted in a recent article, we are running out of time to build up our military. The ideas mentioned above are just part of what is necessary, but if we want to reverse the recruitment ‘death spiral,’ we must start chipping away at the problem ASAP. If we as a nation commit to rebuilding our armed forces, nothing is stopping us from becoming a significant military power.
Spencer Fernando
