Canadian Forces struggling with a training bottleneck, commander tells MPs

The Canadian military has just as much of a problem with training as it does with recruiting, a House of Commons committee was told Thursday.

In her first appearance before the defence committee, Gen. Jennie Carignan, the newly-appointed chief of the defence staff, testified that the Armed Forces only has the capacity to put 6,400 recruits through basic training each year.

«We are exploring ways of expanding our basic military qualification, as well as the rest of the qualification in terms of the various trades that we need to train people post-basic military training,» said Carignan, who took over as top military commander in July.

«We are in the middle of working this [training expansion] plan currently, but the strategic intake of 6,400 is what we are aiming for, at least for this year.»

As geopolitical tensions rise around the world, the military's inability over the past few years to meet its recruiting targets has gotten a lot of attention.

The former top military commander, now-retired general Wayne Eyre, once told the same committee that the personnel shortage had reached 16,500 members in both the regular and reserve forces.

Defence Minister Bill Blair was referring to the recruiting crisis last spring when he spoke of a «death spiral» for the Canadian Armed Forces.

Early this year, however, Eyre said that things had started to turn around and that last winter, the military had started to recruit more people than it was losing through attrition.

On Thursday, Carignan painted a slightly better picture than Eyre did. She told the four-party committee that as of the end of August, the military had a total of 92,798 people in uniform out of an authorized strength of 101,500. She cautioned that the numbers change from day