Members of Task Force Grizzly attend 'Operation Nanook-Nunalivut,' an annual series of drills held in Yellowknife in February.Carlos Osorio/Reuters
More than 7,300 people signed up to join the Canadian military’s regular force over the past year, the highest number of enrolments in more than three decades, the Department of National Defence said.
However, nearly 20 per cent of these new enrollees are not Canadian citizens, but foreign nationals with permanent residency, reflecting changes to recruitment criteria several years ago.
Defence Minister David McGuinty said Canada is now only about 3,600 short of the “authorized strength” target of 71,500 regular forces. There are now 67,827 full-time military members, he said.
“As the Prime Minister has said, we are living through a time of profound change and uncertainty across the country,” he said.
Those enrolling are answering “the call to build a country that’s strong, free and sovereign,” Mr. McGuinty told reporters.
He said if recruiting keeps up, the military will hit “authorized strength” before its 2029 goal.
Figures released by DND show that the Canadian Armed Forces enrolled 7,310 new members in the regular force for fiscal 2025-26 ending March 31, exceeding a target of 6,957 recruits.
Mr. McGuinty said the recruiting numbers are the biggest in more than 30 years. DND could not say when exactly enrolment was so high before, adding that their continuous records only go back to the 1990s.
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The regular force is the full-time, professional military – members who serve as their primary career and are paid year-round.
This rise in recruits follows significant defence spending increases as well as what Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government calls the largest pay raise for Canadian Forces members in a generation.
It also reflects relaxed rules. Canadian citizenship used to be a requirement for joining the Forces. But in 2022, Canada opened military enlistment to permanent residents, a change that followed warnings from the country’s top soldier about a deepening personnel shortage.
The military said Monday that 1,400 of these new recruits in the 2025-26 fiscal year are permanent residents, not citizens. That’s about 20 per cent of the new enrolments.
That’s the highest level so far. In the previous 2024-25 fiscal year, only 823 permanent residents were recruited, according to DND. And prior to that, in 2023-24, only 109 signed up.
The military has been under pressure to show results for several years. In 2024, then-defence minister Bill Blair bluntly said that this crisis represented a “death spiral for the Canadian Armed Forces” if not fixed.
Despite attrition – people leaving the Forces – the military said overall regular force numbers are still up more than 5,000 over the past two years.
The latest recruiting numbers exceeded results from the earlier 2024-25 fiscal year, when the military enrolled 6,706 new members into its regular force, surpassing a previous target of 6,496 recruits. The earlier figures come from an October, 2025, statement from Mr. McGuinty.
The government says it’s setting a more ambitious recruiting target for the current fiscal year of 8,200 for the 12-month period ended March 31, 2027. That’s more than 1,000 higher than last year’s target.
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Canada is not the only military to recently open up recruitment to non-citizens. Australia opened the Australian Defence Force to non-citizen permanent residents in stages – New Zealanders from July 2024, followed by British, American and Canadian permanent residents from January, 2025 – provided they had lived in Australia for at least 12 months and not served in a foreign military in the previous two years.
Like Australia, Canada’s recruitment of foreign nationals offers an incentive. Citizenship applications from Canadian Forces members “will be processed on a priority basis by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada,” Ottawa said when it opened the doors to permanent-resident recruits in 2022.
In February, Canada slightly tightened criteria for permanent residents applying to the Forces, saying that they must be physically present in this country for three years to be eligible.
Charlotte Duval-Lantoine, a fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, a think tank, has spent years studying the Forces’ recruitment process. She said the latest numbers suggest things are looking up.
She said she believes the significant increase in the recruitment of permanent residents came about because the Forces have changed the way they screen this group.
Among the changes, she said, the military, which previously screened all permanent residents under a process used for applicants from higher-risk countries, now under a new system adjusts the screening depending on whether people have visited or lived in higher-risk countries.
Ms. Duval-Lantoine said it remains to be seen whether permanent residents will continue to make up nearly 20 per cent of new recruits because this group “has been driving a lot of the increase in applications.”
Last November, the Prime Minister, saying that Canada could no longer rely on the United States for protection, used his first budget to deliver a defence-spending increase of more than $84-billion over five years – believed to be the biggest short-term cash infusion for the military since the Korean War.
The federal government’s spending for the 2025-26 fiscal year represents the first time in roughly 35 years that Canada has devoted 2 per cent of its gross domestic product to defence. The last time was the end of the Cold War.