National Defence Committee on Dec. 1st, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Good timing. You're perfect.

Mr. Braid.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, both of you gentlemen, for being here this morning and for your presentations to us.

I wanted to start with a question on the topic of Afghanistan. The reserves make up about 20% of our forces in Afghanistan. I wanted to start by getting a sense from you in terms of the appropriateness or the reasonableness of that number, the 20%. Is that the number to be expected? Is it too high? Is it too low?

[MGen Frédéric Mariage]

Are you asking me the question as a reservist or, let's say, if I were the commander of the land force?

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

Just generally speaking.

[MGen Frédéric Mariage]

Generally speaking. In order to answer your question, may I read from my presentation?

This massive use of reservists imitates the American model, and to some extent the British model. Indeed, in 2005, 46% of U.S. troops in Iraq were from the National Guard, transforming it, in the process, from a strategic reserve to a day-to-day deployment force identified as an operational reserve.

Today, the National Guard has serious difficulty in recruiting without extraordinary incentives. The support of employers is beginning to crumble. In addition, the Governors of States even fear that the Guard will no longer be available for local defence ("Homeland Defense") and as aid to civil authority.

The situation is similar in the United Kingdom where the Territorial Army has lost thousands of members through attrition and employers avoid hiring reservists for fear of their frequent deployments.

And I read last week that the British government cut the funds to the Territorial Army but there was such a political...that they had to reverse back to giving the full budget to the Territorial Army.

To continue:

From these observations of the experiences of the United States and the United Kingdom, we must realize that the massive use of the Militia to plug empty positions within the regular force is not any more viable here in Canada, especially without major changes.

[Peter Braid, Conservative, Kitchener—Waterloo, ON]

If I could ask you about training, then, if I understand correctly your presentation and your responses to previous questions, you seem to suggest that you're concerned that the reserve militia is being overtrained. I'm not quite sure I completely understand that. I would suggest that the reverse--if they were being undertrained--would be much more serious. I just want to understand that a little more clearly.

If the issue is that they're being overtrained because of the likelihood of being deployed to Afghanistan, then clearly we need to make sure our reserve soldiers are properly trained so that they can do the job we expect of them. How do we deal with that? How do we reconcile that?

[MGen Frédéric Mariage]

There's no doubt.... And we are not the ones saying this. Regular generals, serving generals, are saying that the regular forces are overqualified in terms of all the things they have to study or go through. If that pattern is implemented in the reserves, then you have the reservists also becoming overqualified.

Now, you have to distinguish between what is the qualification to go to war and serve in Afghanistan and what is the qualification to serve as a reservist in normal conditions in the country in regard to facing a domestic crisis. What we're saying is let's look at the minimum requirement to be a reservist. Let's establish how a reservist has to be trained to do the job that you people decide is the role of the militia. Then, after that, on a volunteer basis, anybody who has the time and the will and who wants to do that can continue with their qualifications.

Obviously, then, if you have to deploy these people in a theatre of operations in combat, then you increase the level of training, but you don't need the whole of the militia staff and instructors across the country to be trained for that purpose, which is the case in actuality and which then prevents young people, talented people, and ambitious people from joining the militia. Also, it creates the problem of succession at the units.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you.

We'll give the floor to Mr. Boughen for five minutes.

[Ray Boughen, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, gentlemen. Thanks for sharing part of your morning with us.

As I listen to the discussion, I hear a lot of what I think is concern around the rethinking of the reservists in terms of operational truth, and there are thoughts about whether there is something wrong with restructuring the militia as we find it today. I'm just wondering if you could share with me your thoughts on that.

We're looking at a unit with a long history and long-standing service to Canada. I'm kind of wondering what we would do differently in the restructuring of the whole operation.

[Col Marcel Belleau]

What we are saying is that we have to--not we, but you--think about what kind of reserves Canada wants. There are two different philosophies of having reserves.

With a country like Canada, which does not have a big population and either does not want or cannot afford a big regular force, you have to rely on the reserves for different occasions. The biggest threat, the biggest occasion, that you will have to rely on the reserves for is if you have a national emergency--call it what you want--and you have to expand to have a larger force. Then you have to rely on structures, on units, like we did in the last world war.

Or you can have another system that is purely a reinforcement of regular forces with individuals, not units. What we are saying is that by the back door, without any decisions made officially by you people, what is going on now is that we seem to be switching from one system to the other. This is what we wanted to raise before you.

That is what our concern is: we seem to be switching from the unit system, with a presence of militia people all around the country, to a kind of system where you have only individuals that you train and send to the regulars when they are in need of such people. This is our concern.

[Ray Boughen, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Following up on that a little bit, if we're spending a lot of time and effort in training men and women for the militia.... I heard you say in your presentation that the retention is pretty low. When people come back from a mission, they tend to leave the reserves, to a fairly large extent. What do you see as something that could be implemented to make sure the reservists stay with the program? After the time, energy, and resources put into the training, it's a shame to see them leave.

What are your thoughts on that? How can we keep the reservists as reservists?

[MGen Frédéric Mariage]

Well, additionally, being a reservist, you're a volunteer. If you want to train during an evening or a weekend, you decide to do that. If you don't want to do it, you don't come to the unit and that's it. The reserves have always been like that.

For the reserves to be very effective, you need two things. First, you need to give them the resources. Don't change the resources. Keep the resources and then increase them from time to time, but don't play up and down with the resources. Secondly, the units have to be provided with the right leadership. Leadership has to come from the community where they serve, because people know each other. You have a commanding officer who is the leader. He can influence. He can convince the young guys or the workers to come and train during the weekends. He can say they're going to do this, or they're going to do that. That's the way the reserves have always been and it has been successful like that.

Today we're getting away from that. In terms of the resources, even if you say the budget has not been cut, go and live with the unit and you will see the way they operate. They spend most of their time as accountants, not as leaders. What we need are leaders to lead and to convince these young guys to come and train. The way the system is now, actually most of the commanding officers, not all of them but most of the ex-regulars who have either left the force or taken their retirement, join the reserve, and because of lack of qualification in the other ranks, they are put in charge of the units. They are not reservists. They don't come from the local community.

If it's not an ex-regular, then most of the time we'll switch to a reservist who is on class B full time. It's good for him, he has a good pay, but it is not what the system is all about. With this system—I can give you names of commanding officers—most of the mayors of big municipalities have commanded the unit in their communities. As I said, you have prime ministers who have been in the militia. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court—he's dead now—was in the reserve. These people have come out of their local community, they know the people, and because they were there also, they are an example for the young people and the workers. We are dragging away from that, and this is our big concern. This is the concern we have.

Today, I couldn't serve in the reserve; I couldn't have done what I've done as a career. People such as the president of a subsidiary of IBM have told me, “I will hire reservists, but they'll have to make a choice to be a citizen or a soldier. If they want to be a soldier, I cannot afford to have them on my payroll.” That's what the system is dragging to. That's the big concern we have.

Yes, we want to support the regular force, we want to have trained people to go on combat missions, and so forth. But we're saying, don't ask the whole community of reservists to be like that, because you're going to kill the whole system.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much.

General Mariage and Colonel Belleau, I wish to thank you. Your presentations were most useful to Committee members. I also wish to thank you for having accepted to appear on such short notice. Indeed, it is just last week that we invited you to appear before our Committee.

We will now suspend for five minutes, after which time we will resume in camera.

[The meeting continued in camera.]