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.
“Describing the current crewing and staffing shortages with ‘crisis’ is probably the right word across the navy,” Topshee said. “We need more people. We need them as quickly as we can get them.”
The shortfall comes amid a recruiting crisis across the Canadian Armed Forces, with officials recently admitting that the number of applicants coming forward each month is about half what the military needs to meet its targets this year.
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.
Yet while Topshee emphasized the importance of bringing in a new generation of sailors, there is a particularly difficult pinch when it comes to a shortage of more experienced personnel such as petty officers, lieutenant-commanders and commanders.
Such personnel not only fill key roles on board Canadian warships but are also critical for training new recruits.
“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.”
At the same time, Topshee said new sailors are being deployed on operations with less experience and training than would otherwise be ideal. The hope is that the added experience at sea will offset any deficiencies from their in-class education.
“The truth is that we’re putting more junior people into operations because we’ve been very robust and effective there,” said Topshee, who took over as navy commander in May.
“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.”
The navy’s crisis is very similar to the struggle that the Royal Canadian Air Force has faced in having enough experienced pilots to teach in the classroom and lead missions in the air.
It is also forcing the navy to take a closer look at how it treats Canada’s sailors, along with an overall assessment of which jobs are critical to its operations — and which could be eliminated.
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.
“We’re looking at all of the occupations in the navy to say: ‘What does this look like?’” he said.
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.
The current shortfall also coincides with a marked effort by Armed Forces commanders — including Topshee — to change the military’s culture to make it more attractive as a workplace, in the hopes of increasing recruitment and retention rates.
The navy has struggled in recent months with several ship commanders being replaced, sometimes while at sea, due to investigations or complaints about their conduct.
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.
He nonetheless suggested that the spate of recent replacements was an indication of lower tolerance for inappropriate behaviour, a greater willingness to report such actions, and greater transparency.
“There was a case where I was on board a ship where the commanding officer … had been fired,” he said.
“But at the time, I was just like: ‘Oh OK, we’re doing a change of command.’ So even on the ship, there were rumours that the CO wasn’t doing so well. But we often wouldn’t even say why something had changed.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 27, 2022.
Demands for government intervention in Air Canada labour talks could negatively affect airline competition in Canada, the CEO of travel company Transat AT Inc. said.
“The extension of such an extraordinary intervention to Air Canada would be an undeniable competitive advantage to the detriment of other Canadian airlines,” Annick Guérard told analysts on an earnings conference call on Thursday.
“The time and urgency is now. It is time to restore healthy competition in Canada,” she added.
Air Canada has asked the federal government to be ready to intervene and request arbitration as early as this weekend to avoid disruptions.
Comments on the potential Air Canada pilot strike or lock out came as Transat reported third-quarter financial results.
Guérard recalled Transat’s labour negotiations with its flight attendants earlier this year, which the company said it handled without asking for government intervention.
The airline’s 2,100 flight attendants voted 99 per cent in favour of a strike mandate and twice rejected tentative deals before approving a new collective agreement in late February.
As the collective agreement for Air Transat pilots ends in June next year, Guérard anticipates similar pressure to increase overall wages as seen in Air Canada’s negotiations, but reckons it will come out “as a win, win, win deal.”
“The pilots are preparing on their side, we are preparing on our side and we’re confident that we’re going to come up with a reasonable deal,” she told analysts when asked about the upcoming negotiations.
The parent company of Air Transat reported it lost $39.9 million or $1.03 per diluted share in its quarter ended July 31. The result compared with a profit of $57.3 million or $1.49 per diluted share a year earlier.
Revenue totalled $736.2 million, down from $746.3 million in the same quarter last year.
On an adjusted basis, Transat says it lost $1.10 per share in its latest quarter compared with an adjusted profit of $1.10 per share a year earlier.
It attributed reduced revenues to lower airline unit revenues, competition, industry-wide overcapacity and economic uncertainty.
Air Transat is also among the airlines facing challenges related to the recall of Pratt & Whitney turbofan jet engines for inspection and repair.
The recall has so far grounded six aircraft, Guérard said on the call.
“We have agreed to financial compensation for grounded aircraft during the 2023-2024 period,” she said. “Alongside this financial compensation, Pratt & Whitney will provide us with two additional spare engines, which we intend to monetize through a sell and lease back transaction.”
Looking ahead, the CEO said she expects consumer demand to remain somewhat uncertain amid high interest rates.
“We are currently seeing ongoing pricing pressure extending into the winter season,” she added. Air Transat is not planning on adding additional aircraft next year but anticipates stability.
“(2025) for us will be much more stable than 2024 in terms of fleet movements and operation, and this will definitely have a positive effect on cost and customer satisfaction as well,” the CEO told analysts.
“We are more and more moving away from all the disruption that we had to go through early in 2024,” she added.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 12, 2024.
