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The Department of National Defence is still crunching its polling data for this year about how the Canadian public feels about the Canadian Forces.

But sources tell Defence Watch that the numbers are similar to the data collected for 2014 (apparently there wasn’t a final number crunching for data from 2015).

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And what did the polls taken by DND in 2014 show?

General awareness of the Canadian Forces is dropping. In 2006 as the Afghan war ramped up, awareness of the Canadian military peaked at 74 per cent of those polled (they were asked if they had recently seen, read or heard anything about the Canadian Forces?).

By 2010 that had dipped slightly to 72 per cent. By 2014 it had plummeted – only 34 per cent of those polled said they had recently seen, read or heard anything about the Canadian Forces.) Numbers for this year are said to be about the same.

The overall impression of members of the military was strongly positive (60 percent of respondents in the 2014 data). That has been constant at around the same number since 2006. That isn’t expected to change with the latest data.

Not surprisingly, the number of people with the opinion that the Canadian Forces does not properly care for its soldiers returning from overseas missions has increased from 20 per cent in 2010 to 38 per cent in 2014.