Canadian Forces recruitment roaring

Rick Hillier, the Chief of Defence Staff, (left) gave a speech today in Ottawa to a conference for federal government communications staff. About 500 were in the crowd at the Ottawa Congress Centre. Hillier was speaking to them about some of the communications successes he and the Canadian  Forces have had since he ascended to the top military job in the country. As I’m a panelist for this particular conference — I’m yakking about blogging, natch — I dropped in to listen to Hillier’s speech. (He was supposed to speak for 45 minutes, including the Q & A, but, in true Newfoundland tradition, he spoke without notes for an hour-plus and the crowd could have heard from him even longer but he’s got a bit of a cold…)

One neat factoid from this speech: Hillier says they’re lining up at recruiting offices across the country to get into the Canadian Forces. Hillier chalks that up to the new gritty recruitment ads and some effective and consistent communications and media strategies over the last couple of years. That’s not necessarily new news. We’ve had lots of anecdotal evidence that recruitment right now is very strong. But Hillier said recruitment is just as strong, if not stronger, in the province of Quebec — usually seen as among  the most dovish of provinces.  Not so, Hillier said — Quebec men and women seem to be as keen as any to get into the Forces. That’s kinda new news.

Hillier said the goal of CF recruiters was to add 1,600 net new troops this year but things are going well enough that he now believes that the CF will grow by 2,100 net new (regular, I assume) troops by March 31, 2007. And that, to me at least, is new news, too.