Liberal Defence Committee Chair John McKay said during committee Monday that he is “shocked” by the “scandalous” lack of recruitment in Canada’s military. The committee heard that despite the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) being 16,000 members short, it was not for lack of applicants. In fact, there were 70,000 people who applied to the forces in 2023, but officials at the Department of National Defence were only able to process between 4,000 and 5,000 of them. The leftover applications stayed in limbo as the military suffers shortages. McKay said he was "shocked" to learn of the staggering number of unprocessed applications. “I find that borderline scandalous, frankly, that we have a bunch of young Canadians keen to join the military and we can’t even process them,” declared McKay. Lt.-Gen. Frances J. Allen, senior Royal Canadian Air Force officer, responded that “we always want to do what we can to reduce both the time and process" but "historically not everybody who applies will be able to meet the standards necessary to join the CAF, nor does everybody’s interest stay the same."“That sounds like a series of excuses," said McKay. "If I know that 70,000 people are outside the door, and they want to get in, and by and large they’re qualified, and we have a 16,000-person deficit, in other words people are leaving quicker than they are being replaced — commitments to ‘improving,’ it does sound like a series of excuses." “And this committee has opined on this several times. I don’t understand why in 2024 we’re not processing a lot more people a lot more quickly, because we definitely need them."
