Efforts to Bolster CAF Recruitment Not Having the Desired Effect

Canadians are not joining the Armed Forces in substantive numbers. To change this, the CAF has bent over backwards to make the organization less restrictive and more inclusive to Canadians from all walks of life. And yet, recruitment numbers have not taken off. How come? In this article, I examine three recent changes to CAF recruitment and discuss their efficacy. 

 It’s been more than a year since changes to dress standards for CAF members allowing for additional piercings, coloured hair, long hair, and beards to be worn indiscriminately, a full year since the CAF announced it would allow Permanent Residents to join the military, and nearly a year since the launch of the new Naval Experience Program (NEP).  

 Let’s start with changes to the dress code. While it’s true that regulations for dress in the CAF had been in place for half a century and perhaps needed updating, it stands to reason that given the serious personal commitment required for a career in the military, one’s preference for body piercings or a particular hairstyle would likely not hold out as insurmountable obstacles to joining up. People gladly give things up for employment opportunities all the time; their hometown, proximity to family, or their personal autonomy from the hours of eight to five. 

 Of course, the military asks you to give up all of this and more, but the calling to serve one’s country is a noble one, a call which I think drives those who do sign up more substantially than the ability to simply “be one’s self” at work. (I also can’t imagine that being oneself is particularly high on the list of useful character traits for combat training.) 

 It is, however, no exaggeration to say that in the case of joining the military, one really is signing one’s life away. Perhaps it’s not the idea then, that one might have to get a haircut or abandon a nose ring that’s putting potential recruits off, but rather, an anxiety that all of the free time we are used to having in the epoch of Netflix and SkipTheDishes will be monopolized by a highly-demanding, all-encompassing career. This is much more plausible to me, and presents a major issue as the CAF looks toward adding more Millennial and Gen Z recruits. 

 Moving on to the decision to allow permanent residents to join the Forces; while at first look, this might seem like a surefire way to rapidly increase recruits, there are problems to be anticipated with adding foreign nationals to the recruiting pool. All CAF recruits must undergo a security check, and this process can take a long time even for Canadian-born applicants. Performing a security screening on someone who’s lived in this country their entire lives and on whom the government has a robust file is understandably far easier than obtaining documentation from another country.  

 In fact, the attempt to secure documents from other parts of the world may be part of the reason a recruiter once informed me that the security clearance process is “experiencing delays due to backlogs in the system”. If I may be allowed an anecdotal example which supports this hypothesis, I was informed by a medic at a recruiting office that medical screenings for foreign-born applicants take much longer than their domestic counterparts. The reason for this is that medical records in many countries can be sparse or may still be housed in filing cabinets, written on physical sheets of paper. According to the medic, local officials can take weeks, even months sometimes, to locate and pass along information.  

 While the data on the number of foreign-born recruits that have been processed versus in the hopper is currently unavailable to the public, one might presume that an influx of permanent resident applicants to the CAF could actually slow the recruitment process from an already tortoise-like pace to that of a snail’s. 

Finally, we turn to the Naval Experience Program (NEP). I’d like to preface this section of the article by saying that I think this is one of the most innovative and meritorious ideas the CAF has had in years. However, the numbers recently released by the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) speak to a problem that is endemic within recruitment; of some 400 applicants to the NEP, only 98 have thus far been enrolled. How is it possible that our navy is only capable of enrolling 98 of 400 recruits (who have applied for a one-year program) over an eight month period?  

 I’ve written about only one potential aspect of the delays plaguing recruitment thus far, but there are a plethora of other issues I could highlight that may be contributing to the pile up of applications. Some of these include: recruiter response times, the inefficient administration of the Canadian Forces Aptitude Test (CFAT), and the rigid annual cycles within which training programs are run for new recruits. The Canadian Armed Forces is always hiring and has offices in every major city across the country. There should be no reason that a recruit can’t walk in on any given morning with their required documentation, pass the Force fitness test and CFAT before lunch, and complete an interview and medical examination by the afternoon.  

 The way the entire process has been stretched out like a bullhide over many months, is, in my estimation, the CAF’s biggest problem, and anything they can do to slim processing times down should be seriously considered. 

 In sum, have recent changes to the CAF’s recruitment strategy been effective? I would posit they have not, for the reasons listed above. I should mention that this article is not an exhaustive account of every reason why Canadians may or may not want to join the forces, but it is meant to suggest that perhaps the Department of National Defence (DND) is looking in the wrong places for quick solutions to a problem that can not be solved by a simple edict from Ottawa.  

Without a doubt, DND will continue to analyze how it can attract more recruits and speed up its processes. However, if Canada is to remain strong and free, it is vital that all Canadians think about how we can maintain a robust military.

Danny Randell is a Master’s student at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy