I'll speak on the issues myself have noticed.
1. Our demographic of recruit has been changing from a more rural individual to someone more urbanized who may not see the same alure in living 30 minutes from the closest real "settlement" of 30k people as someone who grew up with that.
2. Pay, while 60k a year after 4 years is good for someone with no post secondary, we're falling flat in retaining specialized in demand people. Our technical side sees the private sector paying sometimes double without the added stressors that come with wearing the green.
3. Burn out, as we lose more pers the workload does not decrease for those left behind which causes a domino effect of people having to fill multiple roles, getting burnt out, then releasing therefore pushing their roles onto the remaining members which leads to their burnout. Apparently the worst off for this is the navy with it not being uncommon for special hardsea trades being swapped from ship to ship going out to sea.
4. A lack of support to the member. As a soldier I expect a few things. To be paid in a timely manner and if due to the whims of a spreadsheet I'm posted across the country the army has a roof for me to live under. I might be an extremist is saying this but I think a military should have enough places for every member/family if they have one to live doesn't need to be fancy but that safety net should be there in case the local market cannot provide. But after years of tearing down PMQs and selling off DnD land there just isn't enough. Heck even just the shacks on base don't have enough rooms for the yearly FSTE let alone APS so you could worst case go on IR
Good points. Thanks.
How does the CAF address the NIMBY factor for #1? Canadians don’t mind someone coming to shovel them out of a snow storm, or bag sand for their flooding property, or help fight a fire near them, but those big noisy bases with loud equipment and planes and stuff? Those bases would also take up prime land that Canadians would rather see used for more housing, etc.
2 - agreed. Base not bad out the gate, but non-officer specialist/technology doesn’t seem to get the same support as say doctors, dentists, lawyers and pilots. Agree a compensation structure needs to be more wide-sweeping.
3 - a classic negative feedback loop, worsening as the loss increases. The ‘do more with less’ is a classic own goal, but much is the CAF’s own doing with the ‘can do’ attitude. That said, I remember the Navy’s “we’re going to stop sailing for a bit” and the government screamed blue murder that ‘we give you money, you bloody well sail!’ without appreciating the need to recover out of a vicious cycle. Folks are quick to point to this attempt to reconstitute as a transactional betrayer to the Canadian taxpayer, but that’s a pretty myopic view. Perhaps a less drastic ‘we stop sailing tomorrow for X months!” and more a “there’s only so much depth, so we’ll prioritize
Like this until we have more people…”
4 - a fundamental issue of a nation treating its military like civil servants who happen to have a slightly different dress code. The whole “but we HAVE to charge military families the same for housing as civilians are paying, it wouldn’t be fair otherwise!” thing, yet paying lip service to the other side of the two-way street covenant of looking…no…caring for our service personnel and families. Not sure Canada/Canadians are actually ready to see their service members treated much more specially than them.
Thanks for your thoughts, ThaMattHan.