OTTAWA — The Royal Canadian Navy has started deploying less-experienced sailors on operations and eliminating certain positions altogether as it struggles with an unprecedented personnel shortage.
In an interview with The Canadian Press, navy commander Vice-Admiral Angus Topshee said about 17 per cent of navy positions are vacant. That equals about 1,400 sailors that the navy needs to reach its full complement.
That is expected to compound the military’s current personnel shortage, with thousands of unfilled positions across the whole of the Armed Forces at a time when it is supposed to be growing to meet increased demands at home and abroad. “When you’re short teachers, what do you do? You increase class sizes,” Topshee said. “So we’ve increased class sizes. What does that do? It diminishes the quality of the education across the board. But we’re taking the risk.”
“We’ve got very good command teams and we’re counting on the command teams to provide the experience and mentorship to guide more junior people.” Topshee recently announced that the navy was eliminating steward positions, whose primary roles included serving officers and providing logistical support on warships, and the commander indicated more such changes could be on the way. The navy is also looking at changing the way it assigns crews to ships to avoid burnout and additional stress, particularly when it comes to short-term deployments such as sea trials and tests that Topshee said are often very disruptive to sailors’ schedules.
While the navy has tried to better evaluate officers in terms of their conduct before assigning them to key leadership roles, “the unfortunate reality is no system is perfect,” Topshee said.
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