Hi there,

There a lot of things to consider in your question above, so I will try and start broadly and go from there! I am not an expert on recruitment but I can walk you through some interesting primary sources that can paint a picture of the life cycle or your typical volunteer.

When the war began in 1939, even before Parliament declared war on Nazi Germany on September 10th, the Canadian government immediately mobilized Canadian forces and prepared to receive an influx of new recruits. Mobilization was completed as per Defence Scheme No. 3, the third (and by far the most fleshed-out) plan developed by the Ministry of National Defence during the interwar period to prepare the Canadian armed forces for possible conflicts. In this case, the plan in question dealt with essentially another global and/or imperial conflict: it called for the establishment of a "mobile force" capable of both home defence and possible deployment overseas as a expeditionary force. Defence Scheme No. 3 was approved and circulated to the 13 Military Districts across Canada in January 1938; these districts would be responsible for managing recruitment in the event of war. Within each military district, several militia regiments would be marked as recruitment centres and were made responsible for managing the influx of volunteers, conducting the necessary medical examinations and suitability interviews, and ultimately accepting men for service. There were also specific provisions for how the recruitment process was going to be conducted, some of which were outlined in Recruiting Memorandum No. 1 which was circulated to the districts in May 1939. Included in this memorandum was the stipulation that preference would be given to unmarried men, and especially men without four or more children. When mobilization began in September 1939, there was therefore already a framework in place to form an expeditionary force and maintain a sizable contingent for home defence.

The government of prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, keen to avoid another painful conscription crisis as in 1917, was interested in prosecuting a war of "limited liability". This strategy emphasized the comparatively "safer" services of the air force and the navy as being the more important aspects of the forthcoming war effort; large scale army operations posed too much of a risk to national unity if Canada started to suffer casualties on the same scale as it had during the First World War. Although this strategy was soon proved to be woefully naive -- historian C.P. Stacey opined that the idea of any warfare being "limited" was "essentially a contradiction in terms" -- it did guide recruitment in the first months of the war.

As for the kinds of decisions that went into accepting or rejecting volunteers, assigning them to a trade, and whatnot, it is useful to look at the personnel files of soldiers that are available through Library and Archives Canada. I have never tried to access the records of someone that survived the war (there may be some special permissions required IIRC), but the records of those who died during the war are open to the public and many can be found online. Personnel files can be quite extensive, generally much more extensive than those from the First World War, and contain a soldier's medical forms, pay forms, injury history, death certificate, will, and other such documents. The most interesting for you, however, would be the attestation paper that was filled out at the time of recruitment which contains all the personal details of the person enlisting. This was often accompanied by an interview form, where the officer conducting the interview would make some basic (often quite superficial) observations on the interviewee and recommend a trade or indicate whether a person could be a suitable non-commissioned officer (NCO) or commissioned officer.

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