Mr. Garrison, thank you very much for the question.
On your point about the operational budget, one thing I can assure you is that when it comes to any type of operations, they are separately funded. Any time the Canadian Armed Forces are needed, we always make sure that they have the appropriate support to be able to do their work.
When it comes recruiting women, you are absolutely right. We need to do more, and we are doing more. The baseline we set of 25% is not just a certain timeline, or where we are going to stop. We want to keep going.
We have made significant progress. We're at 16.1% women in the Canadian Armed Forces now. We have actually had increases in numbers since 2015-16, when we had about 979 to having over 1,300 in 2016-17, over 1,400 in the year afterwards, and then 1,700 more, and we're on to about 1,800 this year.
Improvement is happening. We're not happy either. We would like to have far more increases, but as you also know—you have highlighted this in the past—we also need to take a look at retention. How do we look at making those supports?
We are providing the appropriate support, but getting one aspect of that is extremely important. Operation Honour and the Path To Dignity were just one way of looking at how we can make culture change inside the Canadian Armed Forces.
Great work is happening. We're not happy with the progress, nor should we be until we actually meet the mission objective. I recently had a briefing from the army commander who was looking at a new uniform and making sure that it had a gender-based analysis plus on it, to make sure it had the appropriate fit.
Let's put it this way: We're putting the science behind the work we're doing. In terms of the recruitment, there was an IDEaS project that we funded to look at how we could analyze our data to improve the way we not only do the recruitment but also align the women to the various trades so we can focus on retention.
We're putting all the support and resources on this to make sure we improve. Yes, we're not happy with exactly where we are, but I also want to commend the tremendous efforts that have been made by the leadership in the Canadian Armed Forces.