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In the comment section of the video is a comment that this is from 40 years of underfunding. What we have here is a fundamental misunderstanding of how armies are maintained. Like the Ethiopian children with extended stomachs in 1984 famine would die if they got fed too much we have the same problem here. It is not that there isn't a large cadre of eager young blood to replace the ranks or even an infrastructure that could be rolled out at scale to inject more recruits on strength it's that we don't have the ability to convert the raw recruit into a trained professionals in the required field fast enough to maintain what we have and build what we need at the same time. We need an army to support our army. Canada has been outsourcing on the cheap and the piper must be paid. We need to develop domestic support and not get addicted to cheap short cuts. It's not glamorous, it's expensive and it a political loser but it has to be done. Just like unifying the armed forces under one centralized command in the under Elliott Trudeau had to be done because the CAF was splintering into redundant and hugely expensive white elephant fiefdoms.

Every government, conservative and liberal have dismissed and underfunded the military.
they all talked, made promises and never delivered. I spent 35 years in uniform.

To be expected as since the fall of the wall (cold war) the pressure to keep a large force to project national will has subsided. There was a charade to punch above our weight and do peacekeeping using lessons learned from the Suez Crisis. However, failure to establish a consensus via established international intuitions such as the UN with vetoes bestowed to the security council mean that was a doomed enterprise. So we only ended up funding the CAF on a piecemeal basis and it was starving for support ever since. It was a political boondoggle to have any political party campaign to the public on more spending on the military when healthcare and the economy always was the main motivator to the polls.

That has changed thanks entirely to the orange king. The public and the business sector has finally woken up to the threat of overdependence on one ally for all our needs and we are never going back.

Dr Strangelove wrote: Mon Jun 16, 2025 4:12 pm To be expected as since the fall of the wall (cold war) the pressure to keep a large force to project national will has subsided. There was a charade to punch above our weight and do peacekeeping using lessons learned from the Suez Crisis. However, failure to establish a consensus via established international intuitions such as the UN with vetoes bestowed to the security council mean that was a doomed enterprise. So we only ended up funding the CAF on a piecemeal basis and it was starving for support ever since. It was a political boondoggle to have any political party campaign to the public on more spending on the military when healthcare and the economy always was the main motivator to the polls.

That has changed thanks entirely to the orange king. The public and the business sector has finally woken up to the threat of overdependence on one ally for all our needs and we are never going back.

Not defending conservatives or liberals but, when there is only so much money around and the people want more and more for free, the allocations of money becomes difficult and considering Canada has not and is not at war, the money goes to the social programs. Only when Canadians were dying in Afghanistan did the military gain some publicity and deemed an appropriate department to get more money.
Also, to be somewhat fair, the governments did buy newer Hercules, get submarines, new SAR helicopters, new Navy helicopters, new fixed wing SAR aircraft, spend on development of new fighters, contract for new ships, numerous equipment for the Army and, huge increases in military pay.
Bottom line is that we are a small country with huge expenses and allocating to keep the majority of Canadians happy means some areas get less. As a wise man once said, "any government cannot give to someone that it does not first take form someone else".