Mr. Garrison, I would say this: there is a lot of effort being put into improving the recruiting, especially on this terrible wait time—167 days—when a kid can go down and be hired by McDonald's within a week or so. We're just not able to compete.
On October 9, 2015, the chief of the defence staff signed an implementation directive which calls for an increase in the size of all reserves—that's all three services, plus the medical, plus, plus—by 1,500 positions, which hopefully will be 1,500 more soldiers, by July 2019. However, given the fact that the whole of the primary reserve is already about 5,000 under strength, if we add that 1,500 to it, how are we going to get from here to there without this massive change to policy, to attitude, to the culture of how we do business?
I can tell you that I have talked to as many people of ours across the country as I could in the last week or so, just to try and get a feel before coming here, and although he signed that directive in October, which is well over six months ago now, I asked what they are seeing at the unit level in terms of improvement. Nobody is reporting that there is any real improvement.
Whatever happens, I don't know how you make it happen, but there has to be a massive shake-up here.