Look, there is no magic dress or deportment issue at the source of recruiting/retention problem. It's a natural cycle and goes this way in peacetime:
Bad economy and high unemployment = good recruiting and retention;
Good economy and low unemployment = bad recruiting and retention.
Recruiting/retention is about to get good again
It'll be bad for a while before it gets good. One of the principal problems with the economy right now is stagflation. We have a tight labour market not because of growth, but because people are dropping out of the workforce, no real economic growth, yet prices are through the roof. In other words, it's overheating due to coolant failure and god only knows how it'll end.
On the topic of the thread... after reading through these 44 pages, I guess my final opinion is that there's no other way forward - given the political, legal and social reality of Canada - than those changes, but I do have a problem with two things.
1. It still requires me to wear a hat everywhere.
2. It ends the practice of having all recruits shave their heads on basic, which is an awfully bad idea in my view. Why? Because it allows people to wrongfully think and feel that they'll never have to sacrifice their appearance for operational purposes. Those individuals might then be surprised when push comes to shove, and that's one more reason they'd have to find excuses not to deploy. In essence, we'd be training and investing in un-deployable - thus militarily useless - members. It's a bad idea for the same reasons that letting recruits have cellphones on basic is a bad idea, and that outlawing punitive PT is a bad idea. In a war, you won't have cell service whenever. If you fuck up, you will seriously pay for it, no matter what.
On the idea that there's no difference between funky, coloured hair, and natural colours and short hair... Maybe dwell on the biological differences involved? It's not ''my preference'' to have brown hair... it's just how it is. It follows logically that doing something other than keeping it out of the way (short) is an outward expression of style, meant to attract attention. Contrary to popular claims, no one dresses / wears makeup / does anything purely aesthetic ''only for themselves''. If you did, you'd be wearing cargo shorts and a T-shirt every day - because that's what folks who really ''dress for themselves'' do.
On the idea that dress and deportment have no correlation with behaviour and mental health... Some of you's haven't gone through CEGEP and it shows. I say that because CÉGEP is the college that every aspiring university student has to go through in Québec, and it includes psychology courses. Some of the basic psychology topics explored in those courses include: how linguistic differences affect cognitive processes / perception, how appearance reflects and affects behaviour (Ie; police officers with black uniforms are usually more violent), as well as an introduction to mental illness (and how a majority of mentally ill individuals have more than one diagnosis, one of those typically being a personality disorder that includes attention-seeking behaviour).
Breadcrumbs:
https://www.healthline.com/health/mental-health/attention-seeking-behavior#common-causes
https://genesight.com/blog/patient/managing-multiple-mental-illnesses/#:~:text=Is%20it%20possible%20to%20have,had%20two%20or%20more%20disorders.
