This happened to be my situation. I graduated with my PolySci degree in 2002 from an American university, and applied as a Direct Entry Officer to the CF later that summer through the office in Vancouver. It took until the summer of 2005 to finally get my invitation to accept or decline working for the CF. I had to invest a pretty significant amount of time and money to get my application through CFRC Vancouver limbo, from LASIK and paying to get my degree verified by an outside agency, to repeated fitness and medical checks (3 year process = expired), to reopening my file because which was closed when I left Vancouver for a month to go traveling in the UK.
I understand now it's going to take more time for clearances for those enroling officer-side, as well as for Canadians who've studied abroad (though I maintain the US is hardly Yemen). However, in this time I was waiting to hear back from the CFRC my life was essentially on hold and it's immensely frustrating not only to wait, but to recieve so little information: 'We're still waiting to hear back from Ottawa'. While it's amusing to say to your friends that your arts degree is so meaningless you can't even join the army with it, the end result of all this waiting is that I became extremely cynical in regards to the CF even before I recieved my service number.
Bright and driven people chafe under situations where they're not allowed to work. If you consider your time valuable, 2-3 years is a very long time to spend waiting for something, especially with no promise of return. I had long given up on my CF application and had moved on to other things by the time it was finally processed and it came as a surprise. 2-3 year wait times do push people away. It's not unreasonable to ask that the CF expidites the application process, and it makes a hell of a lot of sense to improve badly-functioning systems rather than training people to suck it up under inefficiency that could be avoided. Being swamped with applicants shouldn't be a reason it takes 2-3 years to process files, it should be a reason the method of processing them needs to be improved. Acceptance of bureaucratic inefficiency is something that ought to be burned out of the CF with extreme prejudice. I sincerely hope that's not a minority opinion in the higher echelons of the CF; I'm still a little green to have drawn my own conclusions.