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.