|
I am a member of the Standing Committee on National Defence, and regularly question Canada’s Senior Military Officers, bureaucrats, industry experts, academics, and the Minister of Defence. The Committee heard that there is a crisis of recruitment and retention in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). There are 16,000 personnel vacancies and 10,000 personnel are undertrained and unfit for deployment. In response to an “Order Paper Question” from my office, the Liberal government confirmed that it typically takes more than six months just to process a recruitment application, and members are leaving the CAF faster than they are joining. We also received testimony that virtually every category of heavy equipment, including ships, aircraft, tanks, satellites, and missile defence systems urgently need to be replaced, and that ammunition supplies are critically low and not being replaced. Most recently, we found out there was a cyberattack in September 2023 that shut down the CAF re-location system for weeks and resulted in the possibility of CAF member information being compromised. |
