Service members leave the CAF due to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Officials in the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) were reportedly hesitant to lift its military Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine mandate for service members out of fear that doing so might impact their “credibility.”
According to notes obtained by the Epoch Times from a Strategic Operations Planning Group meeting in June 2022, the CAF’s Director of Military Careers Administration (DMCA) initially proposed three options: maintaining the mandate, suspending it with the possibility of future reinstatement or rescinding it altogether. At the time, the DMCA warned against hastiness, highlighting the need to consider “many second and third-order effects.”
Moreover, the DMCA voiced their concerns about the public perception of the military if they would follow the Trudeau government’s lead to end its federal workplace vaccine mandate.
“If we rescind the CDS [Chief of the Defense Staff’s] Directive, the credibility of the institution is weakened, particularly the relationship between the strategic and tactical levels,” the minutes of the meeting read.
The minutes of the meeting, which occurred a day after the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ended its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for workplaces, were circulated via email through CAF Col. Krystle Connerty, a director of the Strategic Joint Staff, who noted that front-line military staff were defending the mandate despite receiving numerous complaints and insults, including accusations of “war crimes.”
(Related: Over 200 servicemembers demand accountability for how COVID-19 vaccine mandates violated their rights.)
After some reconsideration and hesitancy, the CAF finally lifted its COVID-19 vaccine mandate in October 2022, several months after the Trudeau administration rescinded its federal mandate.
But despite the removal, CAF members are still “strongly encouraged” to receive the vaccine. In other words, the mandate remains for those in operational roles or those on short-notice deployments to locations with limited medical access or where vaccination is required for entry.
Service members leave the CAF due to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate
In 2021, Chief of the Defense Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre issued a CDS directive requiring all service members to receive COVID-19 vaccines.
However, LifeSiteNews revealed that CAF lost more personnel than it gained since the COVID-19 outbreak. The Blacklock’s Reporter, an Ottawa-based, government affairs-focused publication, disclosed that only 12,793 Canadians have enlisted in the CAF over the past three years, while 15,176 members have been released. The federal requirement to provide proof of vaccination of 275,983 employees from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the military and major federal departments in November 2021, almost certainly contributed to this drastic decline.
A CAF member, speaking anonymously, stated that there are multiple reasons for the declining numbers, with the vaccine mandates being a significant factor. The military lost hundreds of experienced soldiers due to these mandates, losing valuable institutional knowledge. The member criticized the strict enforcement of the vaccine rule, which allowed few exemptions and devalued long-serving veterans who refused the vaccine.
“And when you think of those hundreds and hundreds of people, you have to think in the corporate knowledge we lost, the trainers, the institutional knowledge, the corporate knowledge,” the source said. “We’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of years of collective corporate knowledge (that) has gone in months.”
But instead of prioritizing its declining population and addressing underlying issues, the CAF chose to worry about its credibility.
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