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The number of people who enrolled in the Canadian military — both full-time and part-time — surged in the last fiscal year but despite the milestone the size of the Armed Forces has yet to reach targets set almost a decade ago.
Defence Minister David McGuinty announced Monday that 7,310 applicants were accepted into the regular force last year, surpassing the benchmark set by the Department of National Defence. It is apparently the highest number of people coming in off the street in more than three decades.
Later in the day at technical briefing, senior defence officials said there has also been an increase in the reserves, which surpassed its recruiting target by 137 per cent.
Despite the healthy surge, the military, overall, remains a few thousand troops short of goals set out in the 2017 defence policy of having 71,500 regular and 30,000 reserves.
Military family inspires some young Canadians to enlist, despite recruitment hurdles
McGuinty said there are 67,827 full-time military members, 3,600 short of achieving that target. The reserves currently sit at 25,054 — a delta of 4,946 troops.
The Defence Department recently set a goal of reaching its “authorized strength” targets by 2029. Those targets were originally set in the 2017 defence policy and the military has struggled ever since to achieve them.
“If this keeps up this year, we will achieve this target earlier than 2029,” McGuinty told reporters on Parliament Hill.
The Canadian Armed Forces recruited the highest number of members in decades last year, but remains short of the government’s goal for military personnel because of the number of troops leaving.
The statistics released Monday represent a modest turnaround from warnings that military staffing had entered “a death spiral” where more members were leaving than were being recruited.
The release of the numbers came ahead of a House of Commons committee called to examine last year’s report by the auditor general, which was highly critical of the department’s efforts to get people in uniform and keep them there.
Auditor Karen Hogan’s report found that while interest in joining was high, the recruitment process was plagued by inefficiencies and a lack of clear accountability. Aside from not meeting recruiting targets in previous years, the audit found training bottlenecks, excessive processing times and delays forced many applicants to withdraw.
Conservatives question timing
The Opposition Conservatives said the timing of the announcement was no coincidence.
“We know this morning that Minister McGuinty came out and did some damage control,” said Conservative defence critic James Bezan as the public accounts committee began questioning the deputy auditor general on the report.
Despite the overall optimism that recruiting and enrolment was headed in a positive direction, the attrition rate — the number of people leaving the military — increased to 8.5 per cent in the last fiscal year, which while on par with other allied militaries is higher than the year before.
Ned Kuruc, another Conservative MP on the public accounts committee, noted how those numbers were buried.
“We see a report come out, and it only states how many people have signed up. And yet … we don’t have the data on why they’re leaving,” Kuruc said.
Deputy minister Christiane Fox said recent improvements to the recruiting site and software will allow the department to better track the reasons people choose to leave. The department is also reinstituting exit interviews, she said.
An internal report obtained last year by CBC News suggested the military’s recruiting drive was being hampered by delays in both basic training and specialized skills training. Many recruits, just through the door, have been opting to leave quickly in frustration over the inability to get trained and into the job they want, the report said.
The military’s head of personnel, Lt.-Gen. Erick Simoneau, acknowledged both during a technical briefing with journalists and in front of the Commons committee that it is a problem they are still trying to address.
“The real limiting factor is not the processing, it’s the training system capacity at basic training,” Simoneau said. “I don’t have enough beds in [training bases at] St-Jean and Borden, simply put, to onboard more.
“So it’s gonna be challenging next year to meet our 8,200 target.”
The military will up its recruiting goal in the coming year to 8,200 full-time members, but Simoneau conceded they are struggling to get training space for those additional members.
In her report last year, the auditor general found that the recruitment time took as many as 270 days, when the standard should be between 100 and 150 days.
Senior defence officials said Monday that wait time has been reduced to 134 days.
Source: cbc
