Defence minister wants to cut military enlistment period in half in hopes to bolster enrollment

Defence Minister Bill Blair on Thursday said the military should bolster thinning ranks by cutting its minimum enlistment period in half to as little as 18 months. Volunteers typically enlist for a minimum of three years. In the past three years alone, a total 15,176 Canadians left the Army, Navy and Air Force but only 12,793 joined, according to Blacklock’s Reporter. “We have to go faster,” Blair told reporters.“I’ve simply shared with them that in my experience — I joined the police service nearly 50 years ago — when I joined I was on probation for 18 months,” said Blair, a former Toronto chief of police. “It gave the police service an opportunity to find out if I was the right person for their profession but it also gave me an opportunity to decide if that profession was right for me.”“Every police officer in this country has gone through a probationary period and I think if we adopted the same opportunity in the Canadian Armed Forces it would give people an appropriate chance. They could come in and begin their training.”Blair asserts the much shorter probationary period posed no risk. “We’re not sharing state secrets with them,” he said. “We could determine their level of fitness, we could do security background checks. All of that could take place while they’re in service.”More people have quit the regular forces than joined in the past decade, according to a February 5 Inquiry Of Ministry tabled in the Commons. “Over the requested period 47,728 members joined the regular force and 51,667 were released,” said the Inquiry.Minister Blair yesterday blamed a bureaucracy that takes months to process volunteers.“Often Canadians will come and apply for a job somewhere, an opportunity, a career, but they’ll also apply in two or three other places and the first place that calls is the place where they go,” said Blair. “We’ve got to be the first.”The Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) typically take six months to accept volunteers, according to Inquiry figures. “The timeline begins when an applicant completes the CAF aptitude test and ends when the applicant is enrolled,” it said. The average processing time was 196 days.“We want them in the CAF,” said Blair. “We’ve got to get back to them quickly. We’ve got to offer them a position and we’ve got to get them into the organization and we’ve got to also demonstrate we are going to invest in their training.”Blair has no military training. Current members of the Commons who have served in the military, counting regular members and reservists, include Conservative MPs Michael Barrett, Marc Dalton, Pierre-Paul Hus, Dane Lloyd and Alex Ruff, an Afghan War combat veteran.Ex-military in the Liberal caucus are MPs Kevin Lamoureux, Michael McLeod, Marc Miller, Harjit Sajjan and Sameer Zuberi.Other MPs who served are Independent MP Kevin Vuong and Bloc Québécois MP Stéphane Bergeron.

Defence minister wants to cut military enlistment period in half in hopes to bolster enrollment

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