Canada

Moved from the USA over 25 years ago. Never moving back, though I visit. I sum it up like this: “Canada: better than the States—and no better than that.”

We sadly keep using the wrong yardstick. Or metre. I do like that we have metric.

it's not all bad. soon they'll get cellphones and flat screen tvs!

My wife is in the CAF, and when she heard about Sunak proposing this brain dead idea from our family in the UK, her first reaction was that nothing would fill her with more dread than the idea of working alongside a group of people who absolutely do not want to be there.

The idea that you could even get a draftee through the modern CAF's training processes is laughable. I don't think the average person has the slightest clue what it takes to be something like an Infanteer. The course has a 60% injury rate... As in 60% of each platoon will be injured badly enough that they're taken off course and have to retry. It took my wife two attempts, and that was doing well. Some people at Meaford were on their fifth or sixth. She's still waiting to find out if she has permanent nerve damage in her toe from one of the defensive exercises where she spent eight hours in manning a machine gun nest at night, lying in a puddle of water, in sub zero temperatures.

The nightmare they put you through on DP-1 is designed to weed out anyone who does not absolutely want to be there with a passion verging on insanity. Nothing is more important than knowing, with absolutely certainty, that the people standing next to you are just as dedicated as you are. That you can depend on them to stand with you, fight with you, and drag your ass out of there if things go really bad.

And we already know how to fix our recruitment; it's the onboarding process. They recently opened up eligibility to people on PRs, and they got enough qualified applicants to completely fill our manpower shortfall. A year later all of them were still waiting for their security check and medical, and most had dropped out of the process because they couldn't keep waiting. That's why we have a recruitment crisis. People want to serve, but no one can wait a year to hear back from a job interview.

Well, that and the fact that members literally can't afford housing next to the bases they're assigned to because military housing is desparately underfunded and the civilian housing market is an investment portfolio for the rich.