CAF updates entry medical standards to aid recruitment efforts

Gen. Jennie Carignan, chief of the defence staff, is shown in her office at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa on Jan. 21, 2025. (Justin Tang / The Canadian Press)

OTTAWA — The Canadian Armed Forces is no longer automatically disqualifying applicants with certain medical conditions such as allergies and ADHD, as it works to improve its numbers and grow the size of Canada’s military.

In an interview with The Canadian Press, Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jennie Carignan said the four medical conditions that will now be evaluated when people apply are attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, asthma and allergies.

Carignan said previously any applicants that arrived with an allergy were immediately disqualified.

“Nowadays, with the technology available to us, that might not be the case unless you have a very, very severe case of allergy that within the trade or, you know, operational fields that you are choosing, you may not have access to the medical support to allow you to, you know, to proceed,” she said.

Carignan said the changes to the military’s entry medical standards came into effect this January.

“We need to understand that things that are diagnosed now were not diagnosed many years ago,” Carignan said, adding that diagnostic tools are “a lot more sophisticated” than they were 30 or 40 years ago. “It’s adapting to the environment of today while also exercising risk management.”

Given how recently the changes were made, Carignan said “it will take a little while” to see their impact.

However, several other changes have already made “a big difference” in terms of offers and intake of future members of the CAF, she said.

For example, Carignan said the military changed the rules around security last fall, with new members no longer needing to have the same level of security.

“Instead of having a bottleneck right at the front and having people wait for a longer period of time, we on-board them and then we keep working on the security level as not everybody needs to have a top-secret clearance as they join for recruit training,” Carignan said.

Carignan said the CAF has also worked on “digitizing” and “modernizing” its tools for recruiters to better manage files and ensure that people coming in are tracked. There is constant communication with them to “humanize the process.”

In the wide-ranging interview, Carignan also discussed the CAF’s goals of building a diverse force, sexual misconduct, its involvement in wildfires and emergency response and Canada’s relationship with the U.S. military, which she said is “extremely strong.”

According to data provided by the Canadian Armed Forces, the population of the force as of late last year was 87,638 compared to the target of 101,500.

For the past several years, Carignan said the CAF has only been able to reach about 60-65 per cent of its recruitment target. Within only a few months of making changes to its enrolment process, she said the force is already just above the 80 per cent mark.

“I’m cautiously optimistic that we will be able to reach the target this year,” Carignan said. “There is a lot of interest out there, it’s about now converting this interest in(to) actual offers and selection for Canadians who come to our door to join the CAF.”

The chief of the defence staff said the organization is looking at a recruitment target of around 6,500 for the year and is above the 5,000 mark “with a lot of other files ready to be processed.”

“We’re on the right track to achieve our target,” Carignan said, noting that, on the reserves side, more recruitment is still needed. “We want to make sure that Canadians understand that their military needs them.”

Carignan said the CAF’s rate of attrition is also “very healthy” at about eight or nine per cent. She said the organization is working to improve retention, especially at the middle-management level, by providing members with career opportunities, prioritizing work-life balance and supporting families with childcare and access to housing.

However, military data suggest less than one-third of military personnel feel that the military “provides a reasonable quality of life for service members and their families.”

Carignan said the retention rate is being monitored very closely with a goal of exceeding the existing personnel target by 2032 because Canada will need “additional members of the CAF to operate the brand new capabilities that are coming to us in the next few years.”

Christian Leuprecht, a professor at the Royal Military College and Queen’s University, said it makes sense for the CAF to be flexible and adjust its requirements to be able to make up for significant staffing shortfalls and to provide equality of opportunity for Canadians looking to serve in the armed forces.

“The organization is what, 15,000 members short, I think at last count, so that’s gonna require some compromise because there’s only so many unicorns out there,” Leuprecht said. “Broadly speaking, if someone is able to aptly perform a military occupation, why would we turn them away?”

Leuprecht said different standards have always been in place for different types of occupational groups, noting that the military continues to employ many members who were injured in the line of duty even though they wouldn’t qualify with those injuries if they applied off the street.

“I don’t see this seriously compromising the military’s ability to to perform in its task given that we always think every military member needs to able to be an infanteer down in a trench somewhere but of course, most military members perform tasks that require extremely talented people that just couldn’t serve in the trench for any host of reasons,” Leuprecht said. “Everybody’s facing workforce constraints, and other employers have adjusted their expectations and do so regularly and so the military does as well.”

“The aptitudes that you need in a soldier today are not necessarily the same ones you needed 10 or 20 years ago,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 22, 2025.

Catherine Morrison, The Canadian Press