The military likes to say that soldiers aren't born; they're made. I think, in many ways, this also applies to the modern Canadian Armed Forces. It might apply more so because the organization needs to train, generate the formation, as they say in French, the individuals they need. That takes a long time. To fully train an officer can take up to seven years, and sometimes longer, depending on the particular trade. They need that experience.
I think what people often don't understand is that you can sort of impoverish the organization, but you need the people who have kinetic experience and deployment experience abroad, for instance, to be able to surge on very short capacity to deliver on vaccines, on long-term care homes or whatever the government might ask the Canadian Armed Forces to do.
I think the capacity exists within the organization to take individuals who want to be part of the organization but, for instance, don't have the fitness, the math scores or whatever it might be. The problem is that it hasn't been able to focus enough attention and resources on those individuals because it has had to draw everybody it possibly can to the operational side.
It's all doable, but it's a matter of how you allocate the extremely scarce resources that exist within the organization, especially on the human side, that junior officer side, which does so much of the heavy lifting both on the operation side as well as on the instruction and training side.