Seamless Canada Annual Conference 2025 Recap
Video / September 11 2025
Transcription
My name is Major-General Josh Major, and this is a recap of this year's Seamless Canada annual conference.
So, Seamless Canada was an initiative that was started in 2018 to try to remove the barriers and make it easier for CAF members and their families to move throughout Canada. The objective of the Seamless Canada Steering Committee is to bring together delegates from provinces and territories with a federal co-chair to discuss specific items which are very important to CAF members and their families, specifically childcare, spousal employment, access to healthcare, as well as housing and education.
So, in Halifax – and I'd like to give a big shout-out to the Royal Canadian Navy for supporting – we're going to have a full day of committee work, where we're going to advance a lot of key files. In the evening, we're going to have a chance to get together in a formal military setting, with delegates, and, very importantly, CAF members and their families, to give a chance for the delegates to interact, to hear first-hand experiences of our members and their families, so some of the relocation challenges.
And then, now, we follow the next day by a CAF experience, where the Royal Canadian Navy is going to take us onto ships and show us kind of what a typical CAF member in the Royal Canadian Navy does every day, to help increase kind of that understanding of what it's like to be in the CAF.
I'm Chief Petty Officer 2nd class Jessica Harper. I've been in the Forces for 19 years as a finance services administrator. So, I have a spouse, I have three kids, aged 17, 13, and almost 12. My husband is not military, so, unfortunately, before we departed for Riga, he had to give up his job. He was unemployed for the time that he was there. Coming back, he utilized all the resources that were available to look for employment.
I feel it's extremely important for CAF members to be able to fill out the feedback forms for Seamless Canada, because it gives them an opportunity to express the pros and cons to their relocation, and whether or not the resources that were provided were beneficial, or whether they may need to improve on them.