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“I’ve always wanted to be part of the forces and represent our country, especially as a woman,” she said, speaking to the Star on condition she isn’t identified. 

“I don’t know if I’m still willing to do it,” she continued. “It’s horrible. It’s messy. It makes you think: is it even worth joining this, if this is what it’s going to be?”

That’s not the type of testimonial the Canadian Armed Forces would like to see as it struggles to overcome a personnel deficit that, as of December, exceeded 15,000 regular and reserve members. Most recent stats, from the 2021-22 fiscal year, show the military dealt with “critical shortfalls” in more than 61 per cent of its occupations — up from 17.9 per cent two years earlier and much higher than the target of no more than five per cent. 

Yet the dearth of people-power is but one of the challenges confronting the Canadian military in 2024.

The short-staffed navy, air force and army are still reeling from the cascade of scandals over sexual misconduct allegations within their ranks. Their aging, sometimes Cold War-era equipment is getting more expensive to maintain, and it will take years, and many tens of billions of dollars, before modern warships, planes and Arctic surveillance tech are available. At the same time, there is general agreement — including from top Liberal government officials — that the world has taken a darker, more dangerous turn in recent years. China’s authoritarian regime has emerged as an adversary of the West, raising fears about the security of Taiwan and the broader Asia-Pacific. War has raged in Europe for two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine sparked the greatest conflict on the continent since the Second World War. And over it all looms the possible restoration of Donald Trump to the United States presidency, a prospect that has countries like Canada considering how they can defend themselves with a less reliable U.S. ally. 

Taken together, the situation has some lamenting that — without a serious infusion of cash and attention from the government — the Canadian military could fail to meaningfully contribute as a strong ally in this emerging, more unpredictable world. 

“We’re not ready at all. We’re not ready in terms of people. We’re not ready in terms of military capabilities. And, as a result, we’re also losing some of our credibility with allies,” said Kerry Buck, a former top-ranking official at Global Affairs who was Canada’s ambassador to NATO from 2015 to 2019.

In a written statement, a spokesperson for the Canadian forces said the world is “in a new era of volatility” that is increasing demands on the military, including to respond to climate-related emergencies in Canada. The forces deployed members to natural disasters across Canada for 131 straight days last year.  

To respond to this, the federal government has been drafting what it calls a “Defence Policy Review.” In plain English, this will be the blueprint for how Ottawa is rethinking Canada’s place as a military power in a changing world with what the government has a “broader spectrum of threats” amid strains to the CAF. 

It’s also taking a long time. Almost two years have passed since the exercise was announced. Bill Blair, Canada’s defence minister, will only hint that it’s still coming, possibly before June’s NATO summit in Washington, D.C.

“It doesn’t seem to look like the government is treating it with any degree of urgency,” said Guy Thibault, a retired lieutenant-general who spent 38 years in the Canadian military.

“By all objective measures, the Canadian Forces and Department of National Defence don’t have anywhere near the amount of funding and resources it needs,” he said. 

Blair was not available for an interview this week, his office said. But the Liberal government’s response to such criticism has so far been twofold: Blair and other officials agree Canada must “do more,” and pledge some future action will fill in the blanks; they also note how defence spending has increased markedly since the Trudeau Liberals took office in 2015.

Which is true.

Under its , unveiled in 2017, the government is pumping billions of dollars towards the military to more than double the Department of National Defence’s annual budget to almost $40 billion by 2026. Much of that new money is going toward the existing strategy to build new ships for the navy, and to replace aging Cold War-era airplanes, including through the up to $70-billion purchase of 88 F-35 fighter jets, a model the Liberals initially rejected as too expensive, and the to replace maritime patrol planes that have been used for more than 40 years. 

On top of that, in June 2022, the government pledged $38.6 billion over 20 years to contribute to the “” of NORAD, the radar and aerospace partnership with the U.S. that helps defend North America.

Ottawa has also $2.4 billion in military aid to Kyiv since Russia invaded Ukraine two years ago, having donated military hardware like air defence missiles, Leopard battle tanks, and armoured vehicles. And the Canadian Armed Forces is leading the NATO “battle group” stationed in Latvia, with plans to spend hundreds of millions on new gear and increase its troop commitment to up to 2,200 from the current 1,000.

And it’s trying to wrestle down the personnel shortage, with plans to actually increase the number of “fully trained” forces members. The military has  dress requirements and to permanent residents — though, as the CBC first reported this week, the process has proven slow. Just 77 permanent residents enrolled in the CAF between November 2022 and November 2023, out of a pool of more than 21,000 applicants. A spokesperson for Blair, Diana Ebadi, said the minister wants the military to make changes to speed things up, including through “modernizing” medical requirements. Noting how the military also has a plan to prioritize staffing recruitment centres and training schools, Ebadi said the navy is also trying to attract people with a one-year trial program for people to see if they like serving in Canada’s maritime fleet. 

In its statement to the Star, the military said labour shortages are affecting the Canadian forces much like private businesses, and that the COVID-19 pandemic made existing personnel shortfalls worse by slowing training and recruitment. 

Yet critics say problems abound. Military donations to Ukraine have not been replaced, and there is still no public plan to do so, said David Perry, a defence policy expert and president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. That leaves the CAF with a shortage, particularly in artillery munitions. Meanwhile, NORAD improvements won’t be ready for years, much like many of the new planes and ships, forcing the military to rely on equipment that keeps getting older and more expensive to maintain.

Combined with the personnel shortage, the military’s “readiness” statistics have taken a hit. As outlined in the most recent for national defence, 43 per cent of the air force’s fleet was able to “meet training and readiness requirements” in 2021-22. Just 54 per cent of the navy’s key fleets were deemed ready that year, while under 66 per cent of key land fleet equipment — tanks, armoured vehicles and the like — met these readiness requirements.  

Perry called the shortfalls “pretty alarming,” and blamed policymakers’ habit of “doing the equivalent of hoarding” with military hardware.

The navy, for example, has flagged how growing maintenance costs for old ships is “putting significant pressure” on its budget, according to a written response to an opposition question tabled in Parliament last month. The response said the navy’s fleet of “Halifax-class” frigates is already beyond its expected lifespan of 27 to 35 years, and that the fleet won’t be fully replaced with newer ships until between the “early 2030s” and 2050. According to the CAF, overall military spending on the “sustainment” of existing equipment jumped from almost $2.5 billion in 2016 to more than $3.6 billion last year. 

Yet even when money is put toward new gear, such as the slew of new planes for the air force, it takes years and a heavy organizational lift to get ready, explained André Deschamps, a retired lieutenant-general who was commander of the Canadian Air Force from 2009 to 2012. New generations of airplanes require new hangars, upgraded digital support systems, fresh personnel training and more, he said. But with recruitment issues exacerbated by the pandemic, Deschamps said the military system is overloaded.

“All this change is happening at the worst possible time,” he said. “You’re down to the bones and muscles.” 

And there’s pressure to do more. Last April, a group of high-profile figures — including former Supreme Court Justice Beverley McLachlan, retired top-ranking military figures, senators, and former federal cabinet ministers — wrote an open letter, urging the government to overcome “years of restraint, cost cutting, downsizing and deferred investments” that have “atrophied” Canada’s defence capabilities. The letter referred to the NATO target to spend at least two per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence, something that Canada — despite Liberal plans to increase military spending — still has no plan to attain.

Mindful of this, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre recently said he would cut “wasteful” foreign aid and “back-office bureaucracy” to increase military spending toward the two-per-cent goal.

To Buck, the former NATO ambassador, the target isn’t the most important metric for contribution to the alliance, at least in a practical sense. While Canada ranked 25th in NATO for defence spending as a share of GDP last year — at 1.38 per cent, according to an by the alliance — it jumped to seventh when looking at raw dollars devoted to the military.

But the target is a lot more important politically, Buck said. “It’s used as a political cudgel, in a way — particularly by the U.S.,”  she said. “It’s a measure of how seriously you take your defence commitments. And that’s the problem.”

Buck’s advice to government is to draft a spending plan that at least shows “a path to two per cent” to “help manage that political hit we take over and over again.” 

Taking such a hit could bring serious consequences. Pointing to arrangements like AUKUS, the security partnership between the U.S., Australia and United Kingdom, Buck said there’s a risk Canada gets left out of important forums in regions that are becoming a larger foreign policy focus, such as the Indo-Pacific. “Either Canada’s not invited, or we have to try and claw our way into the group after the fact, so we’re not at the table when decisions are made,” she said.

A bad reputation in security circles could also mean having to rely on allies for help, and potentially make it harder to ask for help ourselves, she said.

The bottom line is that all these issues, from personnel to aging gear to satisfying the NATO spending demands, require money — something the government doesn’t have much of at the moment, if its gestures toward fiscal restraint can be believed. The Liberals are already looking to shave down public spending by $15.4 billion over the next five years, including savings at the defence department. According to the Business Council of Canada, those cuts might have to quadruple — or taxes will need to be raised — if the government stays true to the budget deficit limits it announced last fall.

There are also competing priorities for whatever extra spending is available, as the Liberals wage political war with the opposition over rising costs and Canada’s housing crunch.

But, as Thibault sees it, this new era of global tension simply requires more from the Canadian military.

“The world won’t wait for us,” he said. “We, collectively as Canadians, have a role to play, a burden to share. And shame on us if we don’t step up.”