A Royal Canadian Navy program aimed at giving potential sailors a year to test their sea legs is attempting to shore up the force’s flagging numbers, and attracting attention south of the border.
Canada is looking for sailors to fill a combined total of 3,220 vacant regular force and reserve positions across the country. This past June, Canada’s navy announced that nearly three quarters of the sailors who signed up for the inaugural one-year Naval Experience Program had opted to stay in the military.
“Our primary value proposition … is an adventure,” said Rear-Admiral Christopher Robinson. “It’s a chance to do something out of the ordinary.”
It “doesn’t hurt,” he pointed out in a recent interview, “that you get paid for it as well. A sailor third class (the rank all participants hold in the program) in a year is going to make a little over $40,000.”
The U.S. Navy should take a close look at Canada’s novel idea
A recent opinion piece in the military journal Defense One questions whether the Canadian experiment could help U.S. Navy recruiting.
“The U.S. Navy should take a close look at Canada’s novel idea,” wrote Lt. Marissa Lemar, a U.S. Navy reserve public affairs officer teaching at the U.S. Naval Academy.
“The service failed to meet its recruiting goals in fiscal 2023, and appears on track to fall short again. And several of the steps taken to boost recruiting — lowering the required score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, and removing the requirement for a high school diploma or GED — have drawn criticism.”
Creating a similar trial program for young Americans would allow potential recruits to see if the service is right for them, according to Lemar. “But — equally important — it would also allow the navy to determine if the participants are a good fit for the service.”
Such a stream would be in line with approaches touted by U.S. Navy leadership, she argued. “First-hand fleet experience would demystify much of what sea service entails.”
Canada’s top sailor, Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee, tasked Robinson in the fall of 2022 to develop the Naval Experience Program and roll it out the following May.
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“We wanted to re-imagine how we attract, recruit and train sailors because we have problems in all of those areas,” said Robinson, assistant chief of naval staff, personnel and training.
“Our recruiting system struggles to deliver enough qualified applicants to sustain the need of the armed forces.”
As of Aug. 20, the navy had 6,042 sailors in its regular force, but the established size is supposed to be 7,811.
“Overall, we’re a little over 1,500 short in the navy,” Robinson said.
The navy also has 4,218 reservists. But it’s aiming for 5,669.
Depending on the stage you’re at in life, “signing up for a multi-year contract can appear daunting,” Robinson said in a recent interview.
“That appeared to have resonated with people. As of today we’re at 1,500 people have applied. We’ve enrolled 264.”
Of those, 43 sailors have finished the one-year program, he said. Half of them have chosen navy trades, 30 per cent have decided to go elsewhere in the Canadian Armed Forces, and the remaining 20 per cent left the military.
According to defence analyst Ken Hansen, a former Canadian naval commander, that’s too little, too slow.
If the losses keep up the way they’re going, then we’re going to flatline here pretty soon
“And what they’re desperate for, apart from just raw numbers, is experience. The tradesmen and supervisors who are leaving — they cannot be replaced even in five or six years by a recruit joining today. He or she won’t be ready,” Hansen said Wednesday.
“So they need either something that’s supplementary to this or they need a whole new approach.”
The navy expects a lot from sailors at a young age, “in a technical sense,” he said.
“So, if the losses keep up the way they’re going, then we’re going to flatline here pretty soon,” Hansen said.
The navy needs to look at handing out “significant” bonuses to retain seasoned sailors, he said. “They really don’t have a recruitment problem. What they have is a retention problem.”
Sailors who spend six months at sea on long deployments should get more time off when they return home, Hansen said.
He pointed to Denmark’s navy, which offers sailors on their return from deployments equal time studying “anything they want. There is no restriction. And people are lined up around the block, euphemistically speaking, to join the Danish navy because of that one thing.”
The Canadian navy also has to “do better with the standards of accommodation on board the ships,” he said, pointing to the new Arctic and offshore patrol ships as good examples of addressing comfort in their “fundamentally Scandinavian design.”
Supervisors and mid-ranking officers on these ships get private cabins with their own wash stations, he said. “They’re just grinning from ear-to-ear. They love it.”
While most participants in the Naval Experience Program are in their late teens, all ages can sign up, Robinson said. “We have recruited people in their late 50s…. We do have people who have had a full career, have always wanted to join the military, but life got in the way.”
Their “mature, calming presence in the platoons, particularly when they’re doing basic training, it provides almost like a parental figure for some of the younger people,” said the admiral.
The program starts with eight weeks of basic training in Saint-Jean, Que. From there, participants go to either the east or west coasts to learn how to fight shipboard fires, staunch floods, talk like a sailor and act like one, too, as they job shadow different occupations aboard a ship.
“It’s a lot of fun,” Robinson said, noting they can also learn how to participate in boarding parties and scuba dive.
“A mandatory part of it is, as you would expect, that they go to sea on a ship and that they experience some of the things that a ship (can) do.”
Participants who sailed back from Pearl Harbor to Esquimalt, B.C., last December aboard HMCS Ottawa and HMCS Vancouver “experienced the full range of at-sea conditions,” Robinson said.
“The weather was awful,” he said.
The waves weren’t extreme for seasoned sailors, “but it provided a ride and an opportunity for those people to figure out, ‘Is being at sea for me or not?’”
Others flew to Scotland to join HMCS Charlottetown for three weeks of NATO exercises. “They got a port visit to Reykjavík (Iceland) as well.”
The five-year pilot aims to offset personnel shortages.
This comes as Canada’s chief of the defence staff, Gen. Jennie Carignan, is saying this country has five years to prepare itself for emerging threats to its security, and addressing the recruitment gap is her number one priority.
For several years Canada’s military has failed to recruit more members than it has lost to retirement or release, something that Defence Minister Bill Blair called a “death spiral” back in March.
“It is difficult to predict how long it will take the Royal Canadian Navy to close the recruiting gap,” Robinson said in a follow-up email, “but with recruiting and training new sailors being the navy’s number one priority, any initiative to welcome new sailors is worth the effort.”
Other branches of the Canadian Armed Forces have expressed an interest in the program, which took some inspiration from Australia’s Navy Sailor program, also known as the Australian Defence Force Gap Year.
“The Dutch and Royal Navy have engaged with our staff to see if the (Naval Experience Program) model would work for them,” Robinson said, noting Canada has been keeping its allies abreast of the effort. “The feedback we have received has been universally positive, so we may see further interest in the future.”
Sailor Third Class Kali Alexander started the program in early June. But she made up her mind to remain in the navy before the year was up.
“I opted to transfer to my trade of choice early,” Alexander said on her last day in the program, at the end of September.
She joined the navy’s regular force as a marine technician. “My first trades course will be approximately six months.”
The 23-year-old Halifax resident grew up in a navy family.
“My dad was a marine technician for 16 years,” Alexander said.
She was interested in joining the navy but wanted to try it on for size.
“I had been in university but decided it wasn’t quite the right route for me. So, I wanted to make sure before I committed.”
Alexander got to shadow sailors and see what they do.
“Growing up I was taught how to change my own brake pads by my dad, so I’ve always known that I had an interest in being more hands on.”
Some people in the program weren’t certain at the outset about joining the military, she said.
“Now they’re excited for very long careers that they have planned,” she said. “Some people that didn’t think that they could sail because they didn’t know if they’d get seasick or not because they were from nowhere near the ocean.”
During her time in the program, Alexander got to sea aboard HMCS Oriole, the navy’s sail training vessel.
They sailed to Mahone Bay on Nova Scotia’s south shore this past summer, where Alexander discovered she doesn’t suffer from mal de mer.
“I was fortunate. I felt a little off the first day,” she said, noting the queasiness vanished quickly after she ate something.
“I’ve lived by the ocean my whole life, so I was not too worried about seasickness.”
Alexander was attached to HMCS St. John’s for her last two weeks in the program, where she had “lots of fun getting to turn some wrenches and things.”
She encouraged other people her age to check out the program. “It tests you,” Alexander said. “You really have to kind of ground yourself and kind of know that you’re capable of more than you think.”
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