I can start, if I may.
This is a major issue. No matter how many pieces of equipment we want to buy, if there is no one to operate them, they will be completely useless. So personnel is at the heart of a defence policy.
The problem is not simply the shortage of 15,000 soldiers that you mentioned, but the fact that, if we want to expand the force, we need more than the 71,000 authorized soldiers. In addition, there is no plan to increase the size of the Canadian Armed Forces to a level comparable to that of the Cold War, when there was only one front, the European front. We are heading into a world where the fight will be on two perhaps even three fronts: the Arctic, Europe and the Asia-Pacific, with fewer soldiers than we used to have.
This shortage does not seem to be taken seriously because, as you noted, the update makes no mention of any concrete plans to increase the number of soldiers, nor does there seem to be any sense of urgency to increase the number of soldiers in the Canadian Armed Forces.
I fear that the problem is unfortunately more difficult to solve than the one related to the need to inject money into the Department of National Defence.