By J.L. Granatstein, May 5, 2026
Recruiting for the Canadian Armed Forces has been broken for decades.
In 1995, the Special Commission on the Restructuring of the Reserves reported “innumerable complaints about recruiting,” including a six-month delay to enroll a single recruit. The bottleneck then was security screening – it dragged on for months.
That was thirty years ago. Today, it’s worse.
On May 2, retired Army officer Bryan Brulotte, now the Honorary Colonel of the Governor General’s Foot Guards, posted about the problem on Facebook. “The target timeline [for a recruit to be enrolled] is 100 to 150 days,” Brulotte wrote. “The reality has been closer to 245 to 271 days.” Faced with that long delay, many recruits simply give up on the military. Between 2022 and 2025, Brulotte added, “roughly 192,000 Canadians applied” but “only about 15,000 were ultimately recruited.” That, he said correctly, is “a system and leadership failure.”
The Department of National Defence has been trying to fix the recruiting problem. In the fall of 2024, General Jennie Carignan, the new Chief of the Defence Staff, announced that recruits could be accepted for basic training before their security screening was complete. At the same time, the Canadian Armed Forces removed the aptitude test requirement for some recruits. Under the new rules, direct entry officer candidates are now excused from this procedure, as are those with university degrees, college diplomas, or specialized skills or work experience.
The CAF also changed its rules around medical standards. Beginning in 2025, recruits would no longer be automatically rejected due to the “4As”: asthma, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, allergies, and anxiety. Now each case would be judged on its severity.
Finally, the CAF loosened recruiting rules to allow permanent residents and recently naturalized citizens to be accepted for training.
These alterations seemed to be working: the DND announced that 7,310 men and women had been accepted for basic training in the past year, exceeding the target of 6,957 recruits. However, nearly 20 per cent of these new recruits were not yet Canadian citizens and, as we shall see, this has caused problems. So, it turned out, did the other 2024 policy changes.
Last week, a leaked internal document surfaced at Juno News: a memorandum dated January 27, 2026, written by Lieutenant-Colonel Marc Kieley, commandant of the Canadian Forces Leadership and Recruit Training School at Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec.
All Regular Force recruits – officers and non-commissioned members – pass through the school. In his 15-page memo, Kieley reports that the training success rate fell to 77 per cent in fiscal year 2025–26, down from a typical 83 to 87 per cent. At the same time, the share of candidates needing multiple attempts to graduate nearly tripled, rising from 5 to 7 per cent to 14.89 per cent.
Kieley is clear about the reasons for the rising failure rate. Candidates fail to qualify when initial screening misses medical issues or when recruits fall short on practical requirements such as drill, weapons handling, or physical fitness. Others fail academically because they cannot pass multiple-choice exams or master core subjects such as harassment and sexual misconduct policies, military structure, and military ethos. Some fail because they cannot meet expected military standards of behaviour or because they demonstrate serious conduct issues.
The medical issues are serious. Since the CAF began accepting candidates with anxiety issues last year, Kieley reports “a dramatic increase in the number of candidates presenting significant mental health concerns.” Many candidates drop out voluntarily. Moreover, in 2025 alone, “92 candidates were transported to external mental health care providers a total of 191 occasions, and the local [i.e., Saint-Jean] suicide crisis care centre is typically filled to full capacity” with candidates, Kieley said. The commandant recommends tighter controls on enrolling candidates with pre-existing mental health conditions.
Kieley also raised academic concerns and recommended re-establishing some form of aptitude testing during the recruitment process. Some candidates had been “unable to read without assistance,” and he suggested that testing “would be an effective method to pre-screen candidates for minimal learning capacity ….” He was also concerned – perhaps frustrated might be a better word – that many candidates, including officer candidates, lacked fluency in English or French, especially in verbal skills. Kieley recommended providing formal first-official-language training for all permanent resident and naturalized citizen candidates.
The school commandant also recommended that options to re-establish fitness testing should be part of the recruitment process. In effect, Kieley wanted much more attention paid to the mental health, physical fitness, and language skills of candidates before they reached his school.
He was also worried about the adaptation, or lack thereof, of some candidates to Canadian life. In one francophone officer training platoon, 83 per cent of the trainees were permanent residents, some with as little as three months in Canada. This, Kieley said, led “to a significant culture shock as candidates had not yet acclimatized to Canadian society, let alone Canadian military culture.” The graduation rate for the first of these platoons was 48 per cent and the platoon “was plagued by allegations of racism (from candidates against staff but equally candidates against other candidates) ….” There were also problems of another kind: “For many candidates it is the first time that they have lived with members of a different sex, and for some it is also the first time they have been expected to treat women as their peers.”
The commandant’s memo also pointed to the toxic training environment his staff had to face in dealing with the mental and physical challenges of candidates and the allegations of racism. There is little doubt that the military’s senior officers, and the system they created, had failed.
Very simply, the problems with the CAF’s recruiting system have not yet been remedied. Yes, permanent residents and naturalized citizens should be encouraged to join the military, but not until they can speak, read, and understand French and/or English and are adapted to Canadian life and the military’s expectations. Yes, those with medical problems should be enlisted, but only if they have been properly screened in the recruitment process. And certainly, the CAF should not accept candidates who cannot read, write, or comprehend instruction at an acceptable standard.
To judge by his long memorandum with its substantiated recommendations, Kieley is a very able officer doing his best to deal with the difficulties he and his understrength staff face. The generals in Ottawa had changed the rules to speed up recruiting with good intentions but had failed to consider the possible consequences. The recruiting officers across the country too often pushed the unqualified to Saint-Jean, and Kieley had to clean up the mess. It’s almost as if NHL scouts sent those who cannot skate to training camp. This cannot work.
This matters because such applicants at the CAF’s Leadership and Training School cost DND money and take spots from better-qualified candidates. It also matters because General Carignan is studying options to expand the CAF to as many as 85,500 regular force members. “In the next month or so,” the CDS told the CBC in April, “we will be able to present various options, and the discussion is going very well,” Carignan said. “There is a lot of interest in doing this.”
Canada needs a bigger and better Canadian Armed Forces, and the Carney government is putting much money (and much of its credibility) into getting this program right. But if the recruitment process does not speed up and function properly, that investment will achieve little. The generals at National Defence Headquarters and officers in recruiting centres across Canada must fix these problems now.
J.L. Granatstein is a member of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Research Advisory Board. A bestselling author and historian, Granatstein is the former director and CEO of the Canadian War Museum.
