National Defence Committee on Nov. 26th, 2009

[MGen W. Semianiw]

Thank you.

First, on the investment piece, I agree totally. But if you take a look at investment in personnel, the Canadian Forces is probably at the top of the list when it comes to what we do for folks, if investment means training and education, compensation benefits and the like, and providing challenging opportunities in work.

For us, the three of us and my entire team--we have about 17,000 folks--this is our mantra: the right person at the right place at the right time with the right qualifications. That's the mantra. The key is how do you achieve that?

What we have in place is a career management system. I have about 250 career managers, as they're called, who actually work for one of the generals who reports to me. They are responsible, if I were to use you as a case, for knowing exactly where you are, what you're doing, what your opportunities are, and what you want to know.

From your perspective, we just put a new tool in place that allows you, online, to tell the career managers what you would like to do, what's going on in your life. You can actually e-mail online--in the past it was all done by phone--and say, “Here's what I'd like to see.”

On the flip side, we now are starting to show online all the job opportunities across the Canadian Forces. Perhaps you want to move next summer or the year after. You can see what's coming open and you can e-mail your career manager and say, “Here's what I'm interested in.”

The career managers make contact with our folks at least once a year to say, “How is it going? I know you want to leave Parliament. We have a great opportunity for you somewhere else.” And it's a two-way street. You have to tell us what you want, geographically and challenge-wise, and then, depending on what's available, try to match those two together.

The career management system, interestingly, just finished its boards. We then take all that and wrap them up into boards. We hold boards every year for meriting, where we determine, at every rank level, how people have fared. And that's what we use for promotion in any one given year. That's how we ensure that the best continue to be career-developed. And at the same time, we contact folks. Not everyone wants to be a Canadian Forces chief warrant officer or the Chief of the Defence Staff. Many folks are happy with where they're at, with what they're doing, but they want to be challenged, either through employment or through education and training.

On the civilian side, I sit as part of the HR executives council. I meet my counterparts--TD Bank, Home Depot, for example, Sears, the Bay--and we talk about best practices, what's happening, to try to incorporate what we're doing. But I would submit, Monsieur le président, that in many cases they're looking at us, at what we do, particularly in succession planning, providing opportunities.

But I would come back to what I said. We're right at the top of the list when it comes to education and training. If you use me as an example, I've been away being educated and trained for five years, not all in a row, but for five years. That's difficult to find anywhere in the public sector or even in the private sector. So we do a great job at that.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

I really appreciate that. That's most enlightening, and it's obviously helpful in terms of your retention strategy.

Commodore, on the issue of training capacity over time, can you elaborate on that? There was a comment made about this.

[Cmdre Daniel MacKeigan]

Yes.

The gold standard I'd like to get to is to recruit and enrol someone and have them go directly to basic training, get a little bit of leave, and then go right on their trades training in order to minimize the gap between when they show an interest to join the Canadian Forces in a particular trade and when they actually start doing it. We're working toward that. With many things we try to get there.

That's what we do to minimize the waiting time and to minimize their time when they're not doing what they saw in a picture.

[Bryon Wilfert, Liberal, Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Boughen, you have five minutes.

[Ray Boughen, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Let me welcome you gentlemen to our meeting. It's good of you to come and share your expertise.

General, just to alleviate one of your concerns earlier when you talked about your children still being at home, my wife asked me one day when our children were in their twenties if I thought the kids would ever leave home. I said, “Well, you're the maid and I'm the butler. Why would they leave?”

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Ray Boughen, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

But eventually they do leave. Mine are both married now and have families of their own.

[MGen W. Semianiw]

Well, that's good to hear.

[Ray Boughen, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

General, could you share with the committee your take on how civilian and military operations may co-exist? I'm thinking of 15 Wing in Moose Jaw, where there's a training program for pilots. Part of it is military and part of it is civilian. It looks as if it's doing very well. Pilots are being trained. There doesn't seem to be any confusion as to who does what.

Would you comment on that, sir?

[MGen W. Semianiw]

Monsieur le président, you probably have to get the commander of the air force to come back to address the issue specifically, but what we have done in the last number of years is move towards partnerships with private companies through an open and transparent decision-making process about who those companies would be. In the end, it's a great partnership you're talking about, very different from where we were 20 to 30 years ago.

This one I can talk about in a little detail. Where we now find more civilians working with us together, on operations around the world, it works out extremely well. Some would have said it's a challenge, but I can throw out to you this small anecdotal story.

Last year we decided last year to do five pilots. We'd go to certain community colleges across the country and do five pilots for training. It comes back to the question asked by one of the members of the committee about training capacity. What if you don't have enough training schools to train everybody you recruited?

So we went to five colleges, told them we'd like to do a pilot, and asked if they could do that. This is now the military with the private folks. We actually put our recruits in there, with leadership, in the colleges. The presidents of the colleges are extremely happy--that the dress standard is raised at all the colleges, that their people are much better behaved.

Strangely, and probably understandably, it has had a good effect on both sides of the fence. The military better understand the civilian side and vice versa. They actually do come to better work very strongly as a defence team.

[Ray Boughen, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Good.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Braid.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, gentlemen, for being here this morning and for the strong leadership you're demonstrating in continuously improving these metrics. It's very impressive.

I have some questions flowing out of the slide deck, and I'd like to start with exhibit H, the priority occupations. I'm looking at the English deck, at two red alert areas: the land communications information systems technician and then the pharmacy officers.

I'm just curious to know what challenges there are with recruiting for those two roles and what strategies you have in place to deal with those challenges.

[Cmdre Daniel MacKeigan]

Mr. Chair, once again, that's a good question. Those are red for a reason.

I'll start with pharmacists. That's the simplest to explain. Pharmacists in the civilian world get paid a lot of money. My strategy to attract them is to meet people before they've started their training to be pharmacists. When they're looking at that bow wave of loans and whatnot to get them through their training, then they're interested in subsidized education and a career in the forces. Once they've gone through and they're finished their accreditation and they now see a big salary ahead of them that will pay off whatever debts they may have, they're less interested. It's a bit more transactional. As anyone can see, there are lots of opportunities for pharmacists.

That's how I'm addressing that. I've assigned one officer whose sole job is to flit about the country seeking these people out and encouraging them to join and be pharmacists.

For LCIS tech, I think one of the largest challenges with that is the name, because everyone knows what... I've filled the infantry and the artillery with people wanting to be in the armoured corps, wanting to be combat engineers. I can't take any more in any province. I'm all full. But LCIS tech doesn't sound like an active combat job, when it really is. If they changed the name to land combat command technician or something, it might be more interesting. Plus, there are educational requirements in this trade that are higher than others.

So what the commander of the army has created is an army signals attraction team with their own vehicles, top-notch people in both their professional performance and appearance, with their vehicles, and they go from place to place, synchronized with my recruiting activities to show off and say this isn't a little computer guy somewhere in a back room. They'd be in a vehicle in the combat zone with antennas and things going on all around them.

That's what I'm doing to show that this particular trade is not a passive one in an office building.

[MGen W. Semianiw]

If you look at the naval stressed trades in particular—this is worth noting for the committee—Commodore MacKeigan did some work to find out the real issue here. We found out that for many--not all--the real issue is grade 10 math.

If you take a look at the current construct—I see it with my own children—there's the option of taking everyday math, college math, or university math. What we need in many of the technical trades are people with university math skills. We've found that there is a cohort, a large group, who have passed everything else, but can't come in because they don't have grade 10 math.

What are we doing? On January 1, he's going to recruit 30. We're going to do a little pilot. Once they finish at CFRS, they're going to go to Borden, where we're going to teach them grade 10 math. It's almost like the fitness approach. We're going to bring people in, select them in, do grade 10 math, run our own little school, get that done, and enrol them.

I think a lot of the naval stressed trades, or some of them, will be addressed in that way. But that's another tangible piece of evidence of what Commodore MacKeigan is doing to address that issue--what's the problem and what's the key to dealing with it.

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

Thank you.

Moving to exhibit J and the attrition lines there, I presume that one of the differences between the green and the blue line is that you have retirements in the green line. What are the other differences there?

Second, improving attrition can be like pushing water uphill. You've had some great success here. What are the top two or three things that you've done to improve attrition?

[Karol Wenek]

First, Mr. Chairman, to refer to exhibit J and give a little explanation, the green line represents actual attrition over the three- to four-year period depicted on the graph. The number one category, as shown in the dotted blue line, is voluntary attrition. That's our biggest source of loss. The second-largest category is medical releases. It's not nearly as large, obviously. Then there's a fair amount of structural attrition due to those reaching retirement age. There were a few administrative cases and disciplinary cases as well, but those are the major categories.

Just to put it all in perspective, even at 8% or so, in comparison to other militaries, whether they're our allies or just other in-front military of other industrial nations, this is a very good number. If you flip it around, it's a retention rate of 92% or better. As well, when we benchmark ourselves against other parts of the private sector, it's also a very good rate.

Obviously we're pleased that attrition has come down. We'd like to keep it down. The kinds of things that we've addressed in our campaign plan really reflect what we've learned over the years in doing research with members and, more recently, with members' families. What issues are the major dissatisfiers that influence a member's decision to leave?

More recently, the number one issue has been issues related to work-life balance. It simply reflects both the high level of operational tempo that the forces have been under for several years and also the personnel tempo. As a result of a number of studies done in previous years, we've really pushed to re-professionalize the Canadian Forces. That means investing in a lot more training and, more specifically, professional educational programs. That all takes time out of a soldier's or officer's day and takes away time that otherwise might be spent with family. So that's an issue that adds to personnel tempo.

Mobility requirements are one of the other issues that force people to consider whether or not they should stay or leave, particularly in the later stages of a career when you have deep community attachments or kids who are in school, as I alluded to previously.

On the kinds of things we're doing particularly in those areas, when we were briefing the Chief of the Defence Staff and the senior leaders of the army, navy, and air force about a year ago, I said, perhaps presumptively, that to resolve the personnel tempo issue there are really only two things you can do.

One is that you can reduce it by stopping operations for a period of time. I think the chief of land staff talked about an operational pause post-Afghanistan, not for long, but just some time for the army to recuperate. Alternatively, you can increase the effective strength significantly in a very short period of time, and that's just not doable.

So the only thing we can really do there is try to mitigate the effects of the personnel tempo or operational tempo and ensure that commanders comply as much as possible with the policy we have in place, which essentially requires the mandatory respite period on return from operations and also a period in which they're exempt for up to a year from being redeployed without special waivers or otherwise being sent away on lengthy professional development courses. That's one area.

With respect to mobility, as I mentioned earlier, that's a little more difficult to deal with. We are looking at developing career employment models that would be more regionally based and would give people more geographical stability. We think this is more important particularly for the senior people rather than the junior people, who may not have developed those deeper community attachments in the early stages of their career.

Then, in the other areas, we are looking, as the general mentioned, at a number of programs that would improve the lives of families and mitigate the stress that the military lifestyle exposes them to. We're looking at pilot programs with respect to child care, at how we facilitate access to health care, and at what can we do to improve the opportunities of spouses and partners in terms of reacquiring meaningful employment when they move from one location to another.

That's just a sample. There are six major lines of operation, a couple of them focused at the early stages of the career, but there are some 44 initiatives there that are intended to address those issues. Now, you could say, “Look at the percentage you've achieved now, with 7.9% overall and 5.1% voluntary, so why don't you just declare victory?”

Well, to some extent we've benefited from the economic downturn. If you look at exhibit J, the red arrow is pointing to September 2008, which was the beginning of the economic downturn. So there's a very close relationship here. The really big lever in influencing our ability to recruit, to some extent, but more importantly to retain people, is what's going on in the external economy.

So if, as the Conference Board of Canada suggests, we might see a return to a competitive labour market as early as 2011, we have to make sure when that happens that we have done something to address current and ongoing dissatisfaction of military life.

To put that in perspective, when we do surveys on how members feel about military life, they are overwhelmingly positive about their experiences. They feel they're well supported. There's always a minority who don't feel that way. Even some of the surveys we've done with spouses and partners of members have shown that they're very supportive of their spouses and the members' military careers.

So we have some fairly good indicators that we're doing a lot of things right, but as the general and others have said, there's always room for improvement.

[MGen W. Semianiw]

If I can quickly build on that, I have a plan here. Remember, this is more of an art than a science. I can't tell you that by doing everything on our plan here, les voilà, everything is going to be great. Nobody can say that. But we've learned in all of this that you have to do everything if you want to at least achieve that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Thank you very much.

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

Thank you very much.

I have one final and equally important question. Is there any way I can sign up for that fitness program?

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[MGen W. Semianiw]

You look pretty fit.

[The Chair, Conservative, Maxime Bernier]

Major-General, Commander, and Mr. Wenek, thank you for being with us this morning. It was very useful for the members.

Mr. Bachand.

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Mr. Chair, I want to thank our weaknesses, as you just did. I do not know if my colleagues have received as many letters as myself about Group Reserves 2000, which is a kind of group representing the reserve. Since the issue was frequently raised today, I think it might be interesting to hear them in the near future since it is somewhat related to our study of recruitment in the armed forces. So, I would suggest that we invite representatives of Group Reserves 2000 in order to complete our work on recruitment and retention. By the way, they did send us letters a long time ago asking to appear before the committee. We might use this opportunity to complete our study.