There are three things at the heart of your question, sir.
The first, of course, is that your statistics speak for it; we have Canadians who want to join the forces. Furthermore, the more successful we are at actually addressing those who are willing to step forward and say they want to come in, the more we know there is a multiplier effect. Once they actually successfully get in, they talk to people in their communities and people there start saying, hey, that's a pretty neat job, and maybe that's something they want to do.
That existing number that you quote us is in fact an indication that this is not a problem of reaching Canadians. It's often portrayed as having to allow people to have long hair or having to relax the dress codes. That's not the issue. Let me be very clear on it. We have the people stepping up to do it.
There are two problems. The first one is that our forces are stretched so thin that we can't dedicate the necessary personnel to say, “Okay, how do we bring these people in? How do we train them?” Anecdotally, I have a number of students who applied to join the military. They signed up and they passed the medicals, and then they were sitting for a year or two before they got the call back. Once again, I don't know if that is indicative of everyone, but I have talked to enough students to think this is a serious problem.
The second element is that we have allowed perfection and a fear of failure, i.e., letting the one or two bad apples in means that we have to have such a perfect system that we're not willing to.... We need numbers. We need a system that says, instead of being perfect, instead of having everybody screened and examined so carefully, we have to loosen that up and accept the risk that comes with it.
I would argue it's much more important to get the numbers up, to have that sustainability, to get those communities involved rather than saying, oh, we had that one person that the Ottawa Citizen said was a military person. How could the military ever have allowed that one individual in?
I think we have to change the mindset on that, and we have to do it right now.