Staff work at a Canadian Armed Forces recruitment centre in Ottawa in September, 2022.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Charlotte Duval-Lantoine is the vice-president of Ottawa Operations and a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute
Richard Shimooka is a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
The past few weeks have been a roller coaster for the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF). After celebrating a 30-year high in recruitment, an internal report that raised questions about the quality of these new recruits was leaked.
The report was written by the commander of the school responsible for basic military qualifications. It outlined how changes in entry standards, which started in 2022 with the opening of the military to permanent residents, affected training outcomes. The bottom line stood in sharp contrast with the optimism Canadian generals displayed a week prior: the completion rate of basic training declined from a historical average of 85 per cent to 77 per cent.
These findings sent shockwaves through the defence community, and raised questions around the quality of recruits and future operational effectiveness. But the reaction may miss two key points. First, the report demonstrates that, despite changes in standards to admissions, criteria for success at basic training have not changed.
Success rate for basic training in Canadian military drops
Second, the report reflects an important shift toward risk-taking, learning, and adaptation within the military. This is what we want for an organization that wants to win the next war. As retired Australian general Mick Ryan noted in assessing the war in Ukraine, “[a]daptation is THE critical contemporary and future capability for nations and their military organizations to win in war.”
The reality is that any modernization plan must address the critical personnel deficiency that has plagued the CAF for the past 30 years, starting with the poorly managed drawdown of the 1990s. Its effects have been crippling and wide-ranging; contributing to low readiness rates among units and systems, poor morale, high attrition rates, and the delayed transition to new capabilities. Without a robust pool of military personnel to fill existing skill deficiencies, as well as emerging ones as the CAF introduces new capabilities, any effort to create a modern fighting force will continue to stall. Thus, innovation in how the military recruits and trains is an essential element towards this objective.
The current effort was a small gambit, moving in the right direction. While the military may have opened to permanent residents, removed aptitude test requirements, and relaxed medical limitations, it did not change any of the criteria defining successful completion of basic training. Thus, enters simple arithmetic: as the CAF widens its pool of candidates and enrollees, the success rate at the recruit school declines. Does it mean that the military will now have lower quality aviators, sailors, and soldiers? No, because expectations for graduation have remained unchanged.
The military has tried to pre-empt the challenges associated with relaxing standards for entry. In 2024, it introduced a probationary period, which, ironically, may contribute to lower completion rates by making it easier to remove recruits who do not meet the standards. Since March 2026, the CAF requires three years of residency before eligibility (the initial policy also never gave permanent residents unconditional eligibility).
The latest recruitment announcement also included measures to modernize application and recruitment processes and increase recruit school capacity.
After decades of difficulty reaching its total strength (the government authorized the Regular Force to grow to 70,000 in 2008, a target that has yet to be met), the military is proactively rethinking recruitment. It was high time the military tried a different approach.
The leaked report suggests the CAF is embracing the kind of risk-taking defence experts have long urged in procurement. While fear of poor results fuels risk aversion, the military, defence community, and public must learn to accept risk and understand that it comes with downsides – this is how one innovates and adapts.
But the CAF could – and should – be bolder.
Instead of tweaking the selection standards, the military should establish entry and basic training standards tailored to recruits’ chosen trades, which would help restore historical training success rates without reducing overall enrollment. Adequately resourcing recruitment and training schools will be crucial, but digitized recruitment now makes it more feasible than a decade ago. It would improve triaging of candidates by skills and interest, and could reduce attrition.
This would require a different way to think about recruitment and who we think aviators, sailors, and soldiers should be. It would be uncomfortable – and difficult – for the military to implement, but not impossible. Doing it would show that the CAF is adapting, and is becoming the learning organization it claims to be. It is time we build this muscle, however uncomfortable the process is.