National Defence Committee on April 6th, 2022

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Ladies and gentlemen, let's call this meeting to order. This is the 16th meeting of the national defence committee.

We are continuing our study on recruitment and retention, and we are joined by our two witnesses: Professor Christian Leuprecht, and June Winger, national president of the Union of National Defence Employees.

Before I call on Professor Leuprecht for his five-minute opening statement, ladies and gentlemen, we continue to run the clock here. We're 16 minutes late in starting. I propose to shave a minute off everybody's time on the first round, and a minute off everybody in the second round. Hopefully, that will get us somewhere close to the hour that we have allocated. Unless I see wild and crazy objections, that's what we're going to do.

With that, Professor Leuprecht, you have five minutes, please.

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht, Professor, Royal Military College, Queen’s University, As an Individual]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I will speak in English, but I will answer questions in both official languages.

Thank you for the invitation.

Last week, I was called before government operations on the topic of procurement. Today, I have been asked to share my expertise on recruitment and retention in the Canadian Armed Forces and across the defence team. Last week’s subjects and this week’s testimonies are related.

It can take up to 15 years to envision, initiate, procure and implement a new system, such as the next-generation air force fighter program. Less apparent is that it takes just as long to generate the experienced workforce to operate these complex systems. For years, the CAF has had to privilege operations. Now people need to be reconstituted, but the people and equipment systems are out of sync for regenerating and maintaining the force and aligning that with equipment modernization.

The CAF now suffers from a sizable experience gap, especially at the level of junior NCMs and officers. This “missing middle” is the centre of gravity for the CAF. This middle force does the work of recruiting, instructing, absorbing in units and supervision in units. In terms of readiness, this presents a significant risk of failure at a time of growing demand on the CAF and growing complexity of missions.

For years, the CAF has been sufficiently robust or the nature of conflict has been such that the government could choose the force packages that worked for the CAF. Meanwhile, baseline foundational capabilities have been eroded, but in the new security environment, government no longer has the luxury of choosing baseline or tailor-made packages. This shortfall bears considerable reputational risk, as admonishments of Canada by both the Secretary General of NATO and the Biden administration suggest.

The “missing middle” is not only the members who train the force and operate equipment. They are the ones the government calls on as a last resort, whether to manage national vaccine distribution or mitigate the fallout from mismanaged long-term care facilities during the pandemic. Ergo, people are the CAF’s most important and underappreciated capability and should be treated as such.

Talent has to be recruited, trained and retained. To this effect, the first two pillars of the new CAF journey are not just the most pressing for the organization, but, aptly, they are also the subject of national defence's current study on renewing personnel generation and modernizing the employment model.

As of February 22, the CAF is 7,600 members short of its authorized strength. Due to imbalances in the training system, it is actually 10,000 people short in the operational force. The CAF is currently operating at only about 85% operational force size on current mandates and roles. The organization is especially short on master corporals [Technical difficulty—Editor]. This experience gap is having and will have cascading effects for years to come.

As a result, stabilization and recovery of military personnel are a top priority. Generate bespoke personnel for one hundred endangered occupational functions and leadership positions, especially to meet requirements of the navy as well as across the cyber, space and information domains. Reduce early service attrition, as well as differentiated unhealthy attrition at the end of initial engagements, which is after a member's first or second term of service, due to discrimination, harassment, misconduct or sexual misconduct. Set conditions to develop and build future force capability.

To this effect, I offer the following observations for MPs as stakeholders in what General Brodie calls the modern mobilization mindset and in the movement to regenerate the CAF and ensure the operational readiness of a vital and venerable national institution and instrument of foreign policy and national power.

First, expand the CAF and public service talent pool. This isn't mass recruitment. It's about a targeted approach to interest the right people in the right occupations. Recruiting is a whole-of-government and a whole-of-nation effort. Every riding and every member of Parliament has a key role to play in building trust in the credibility of the CAF and raising awareness of the CAF as an employer of choice, especially among women, diverse ethno-cultural groups, immigrant communities and indigenous peoples.

Second, make the defence team more agile by reducing and streamlining HR processes and policies. There are hundreds of them. Onerous processes are partially responsible for the prevailing staff shortages across the defence team.

Without more money and more staff, modernizing the rules and processes to make recruitment and retention more feasible and more affordable and putting in place the ministerial authorities to execute are existential to reconstitute the CAF, in particular stabilization and recovery of personnel capability. To this end, the CAF needs to modernize hundreds of policies related to recruitment and retention that are out of date. That requires priority attention by central agencies.

The Standing Committee on National Defence must ensure that Treasury Board, and in particular its president, make policy renewal for DND and the CAF a top priority. Bureaucratic or political delays will further imperil the ability of the CAF to operate.

Number three, MPs can enhance pillar three of the CAF journey, which is to support military families, by ensuring they are actively invested in minimizing stressors on CAF families through effective and efficient intergovernmental co-operation, coordination and collaboration among federal, provincial, territorial and local authorities in areas such as access to health care, education and child care.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you.

Ms. Winger, go ahead.

[June Winger, National President, Union of National Defence Employees]

Thank you for the opportunity to appear today.

The Union of National Defence Employees of the Public Service Alliance of Canada represents 20,000 civilian defence workers. Our members ensure that military operations are mission-ready at all times and that military members have safe and secure places to live and work. Our members are experts who work on bases and in offices, warehouses, airports, labs and garages. They provide consistent and knowledgeable services so that the military can be agile and combat-ready.

Privatization, contracting out, sexual misconduct, harassment and discrimination undermine our members' work and occupational satisfaction.

Our 2020 report highlighted the dangers of contracting out cleaning services. It showed that budget allocation restraints force base commanders to regularly contract out essential work, costing more and providing poorer service. For example, this is a quote from a DND briefing note in Kingston:

It was observed that in an effort to increase the profit margin the contract cleaners were using inferior or improper cleaning products which resulted in additional maintenance, environmental problems and health and safety issues resulting in unfit living conditions.

The statement of work for the contract with Dexterra at Kingston has a total value of just over $3 million over six years. That's less than half of what's necessary to pay the workers even a minimum wage. It's a clear indication that the service will be compromised.

Our report also detailed the situation of a contracted minimum-wage worker who cleaned a DND medical centre. During most of her employment, she didn't have the necessary WHMIS training and didn't understand how the chemicals she used could hurt herself or others. She was instructed to water down cleaning solutions and forced to clean secure areas without having the proper security clearance. It wasn't her fault, but her work compromised the patients and other workers. She eventually quit for better work, pay and benefits offered at a fast-food outlet.

DND must stop contracting out and must repatriate existing contracted-out services. There must be transparent and comprehensive reasons if contracting out must be used on rare occasions.

Harassment within DND is systemic and entrenched, and it's not limited to members of the military.

One of our members, Kristina MacLean, experienced constant sexual and racial harassment, and she filed numerous grievances and complaints. She won. As a result, she was forced to endure even more harassment. According to MacLean, “Managers are afraid to acknowledge anything out of line because they fear not getting promoted. They make problems go away.” And they tried to make her go away.

The culture in fire halls is another example of toxicity.

CFB Valcartier firefighters filed nine violence in the workplace complaints, eight of which were founded. Firefighters at CFB Suffield have accused the deputy fire chief of violent behaviour while the fire chief stood idly by. Complaints dating back to 2019 have yet to be resolved.

Our union is working with the investigation into sexual misconduct and workplace harassment conducted by former Supreme Court Justice Louise Arbour. We commend Minister Anand for her apology, and we support her acceptance of Madame Arbour's initial recommendation that all such incidents be investigated and prosecuted in the civilian justice system.

Now DND needs to expedite the current active investigations. It needs to enforce harassment policies and ensure that those committing abuses face consequences, and it must include civilian workers in all aspects of any review of the current systems.

When it comes to occupational satisfaction, wage gaps are a major issue. DND's operational workers are paid less than their equivalent trades in the private sector.

DND firefighters, for example, are paid approximately 20% less than their equivalent municipal firefighters are, yet DND firefighters are responsible for a much wider range of safety and security duties, more than what is normal for a first-class municipal firefighter. Also, they're not eligible for the early retirement that's available to nearly every other firefighter in every other jurisdiction.

Thank you. I look forward to answering your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Ms. Findlay, you have five minutes.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and to the witnesses, thank you for being here.

Professor Leuprecht, you talked about expanding the CAF talent pool and getting the right people in the right positions. Do you think universality of service should still be a criterion if you're talking about specialized positions in IT, for instance?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

In the kinetic domain, universality of service will remain, I think, indispensable because you will run into morale issues if some people get deployed and others don't.

But there are, for instance.... You mentioned IT. IT is a particular challenge because we now have a cybertrade on the uniform side, but we don't have an equivalent cybertrade on the civilian side. The department is engaged in workarounds, but we need that civilian trade because it's a way of bringing in people with these qualifications who don't necessarily want to be in uniform.

There are certain tasks only people in uniform can do, but one way to compensate for some of the shortfalls is to have greater agility in creating equivalent trades on the civilian side, and then also providing more lateral movement so people can move from other departments into those trades and out again, as well as from the private sector into the department and out again.

Those are areas where we're simply not particularly agile.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

Thank you.

What do you think draws people to the Canadian Forces as recruits?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

I'm sorry. I didn't hear the first part.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

What do you think draws people to the Canadian Forces as recruits? What attracts them to sign up?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

I think the Canadian Armed Forces is an employer of choice and the numbers would suggest that. In any given year, there are about 35,000 to 65,000 people who come through the door, and about 5,000 of those end up getting hired.

I would say that the organization has good standing with the public and there's a broad range of reasons why people will join. The key is to ensure that, in particular for members from under-represented groups, the organization is broadly representative of the society that it serves.

We know the Canadian Armed Forces has made inroads in particular with visible minority groups, as well as with indigenous people, but if you look at the most recent analytics, there are very significant challenges in the attractiveness of the organization to women.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

During the Afghan war, we seemed to have great success in recruiting young Canadians. What do you think motivated that?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

I think the Canadian Armed Forces is a foreign policy tool, possibly the government's most important foreign policy tool. I'm not sure that's widely understood by Canadians or even on the Hill.

I think what we saw during Afghanistan was attention by the government to the Canadian Armed Forces as an instrument of policy and as an instrument of national power, and we saw a government that stood behind its Canadian Armed Forces and made the Canadian Armed Forces a policy priority.

I think inherently when people look at what employer they are going to join, they want to join an employer that has the backing of the government of the day. I think it is key that defence be a top policy priority at any given time, regardless of the political stripe of the government, in the Prime Minister's Office and in cabinet. I'm not sure that's reflected to Canadians, at times, in government policy.

[Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock, BC]

What more do you think could be done by the CAF and National Defence to attract women, aboriginals, LGBTQ+ members and people from ethnic minorities? What can they do to reach out better?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

We need a very targeted recruitment and relationship-building mechanism. We have a challenge in that the forces aren't really present in those areas where there's the greatest demographic growth and the greatest representation, both in general of the Canadian Armed Forces recruit pool as well as of those under-represented groups. It's in part because we don't have bases in most major urban areas in Canada.

We need to have a much more targeted approach, and a much more systematic and long-standing relationship-building approach. The reserves play an important role in familiarizing Canadians, and that recruit pool in particular, with the organization and the prospects that the organization offers. I think most Canadians have complete unfamiliarity with working for the federal government, let alone working for the Canadian Armed Forces, because if you live in Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal, it's highly improbable you have ever met anyone who works for the federal government, let alone anyone who wears the uniform.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Ms. Findlay.

Mr. Fisher, you have five minutes.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank both of our witnesses for being here and for their expert testimony.

Professor, I'm really pleased that you're back on this study, because you added a great deal to the last study we just finished up.

I want to touch on universality of service. I know that my colleague Ms. Findlay touched on it as well. You used the term “modernize”, to modernize the model. I'm just going to read here from the “Defence Administrative Orders and Directives”. I think modernizing the model is one of the ways out of this recruiting issue we have.

The principle of the universality of service...holds that CAF members are liable to perform general military duties and common defence and security duties, not just the duties of their military occupation or occupational specification. This may include, but is not limited to, the requirement to be physically fit, employable and deployable for general operational duties.

What challenges does this create for recruitment and retention, Professor?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

One of the problems the organization had is that it didn't even know exactly what its shortfalls were or how to remedy them. It now has the analytics capability to know exactly where its people are and what is required.

These are very distinct challenges, the recruitment challenge and the retention challenge. You'll see in the new CAF journey that these are pillars one and two, and they're pillars one and two for a good reason: The entire rest of the organization hinges on them, and they are the component that is currently at the single greatest risk.

I would say the greatest challenge has been that, for 20 years, government has focused on operations and pushing out the Canadian Armed Forces on operations without putting.... The organization is too small to be able to do major operations, major maintenance and sustainment, and major regeneration at the same time, so government has had to focus on operations, operations, operations. It has not invested in regeneration, and it has not invested in or paid attention to maintenance and sustainment.

I would plead with you as a committee that that's where the eyes need to be on the ball, because there is now such a critical shortage, as I laid out for you, of some key personnel that you are now genuinely endangering the ability of this organization to respond to the requests of government when called upon in critical and complex operations.

[Darren Fisher, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Professor, during your opening remarks, I wanted to ask you about resistance to change. Our society has a resistance to change. You used the term “morale issues”. Were you speaking to the fact that, if we were to remove stipulation on physical fitness or different aspects of universality of service...? Talk about that a little bit, about how that resistance to change is a real thing and how that might impact recruitment and retention as well.

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

The military likes to say that soldiers aren't born; they're made. I think, in many ways, this also applies to the modern Canadian Armed Forces. It might apply more so because the organization needs to train, generate the formation, as they say in French, the individuals they need. That takes a long time. To fully train an officer can take up to seven years, and sometimes longer, depending on the particular trade. They need that experience.

I think what people often don't understand is that you can sort of impoverish the organization, but you need the people who have kinetic experience and deployment experience abroad, for instance, to be able to surge on very short capacity to deliver on vaccines, on long-term care homes or whatever the government might ask the Canadian Armed Forces to do.

I think the capacity exists within the organization to take individuals who want to be part of the organization but, for instance, don't have the fitness, the math scores or whatever it might be. The problem is that it hasn't been able to focus enough attention and resources on those individuals because it has had to draw everybody it possibly can to the operational side.

It's all doable, but it's a matter of how you allocate the extremely scarce resources that exist within the organization, especially on the human side, that junior officer side, which does so much of the heavy lifting both on the operation side as well as on the instruction and training side.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Ms. Normandin, go ahead for five minutes.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I thank the witnesses for joining us. We are always very happy about that.

I will first turn to Professor Leuprecht.

I will stay on the topic of universality. In the future, we will probably increasingly need to use the forces' services to respond to climate emergencies; that is what we have seen in the past. Of course, there has been COVID‑19, but there have also been fires and floods, among others.

Would it be relevant, at the very least, to consider the idea of setting up a paramilitary organization or some form of militia that would be used specifically for those kinds of responses? It could even interest some people, who don't want to participate in combat, for instance, which could be a positive thing for recruitment.

Do you think this possibility should be explored?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

That is an excellent question, Ms. Normandin.

I will send to the committee my study on this issue.

There are three options when it comes to this.

First, there is the American option. We could create an organization like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, which is a large bureaucracy that costs a lot of money and moves very slowly. I assume that is appropriate for the United States, but there are good reasons why other allies have not adopted that system.

Second, we could have organizations that respond to emergencies. For example, Australia and many European countries have emergency response services. In the medium term, we could set up that kind of an organization in Canada, but, over the short term, that infrastructure does not exist. For years, I have been insisting that this type of infrastructure is necessary.

Currently, when we use the Canadian Armed Forces for domestic deployments, resources are available; we have that luxury. However, if a widespread international crisis occurred and we needed forces to protect our allies, our country and the continent, those kinds of resources would no longer be available. So it is necessary for the provinces to create organizations that could provide volunteers and a skilled workforce.

The third option is the one we have adopted, and it consists of an increase in the resources and expertise of the Canadian Red Cross. But that also has its limitations. The Red Cross staff has limited expertise. The Red Cross needs to have a staff with broader expertise to meet your stated requirements.

The fourth option, which I presented in my study, is my preferred one. It consists in creating a unit of about 2,000 people within the Canadian Armed Forces. That unit would be dedicated to domestic deployment and would work on achieving your stated objectives. If we don't need to mobilize that unit for a domestic deployment, it could participate in the development of indigenous communities in the far north. On the one hand, such a unit could improve Canada's response capacity to national requirements; on the other hand, it could be a complement to the development efforts of communities in the far north. The far north needs the staff and resources that only the Canadian Armed Forces have.

[Christine Normandin, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you very much.

I will read with interest the documents you will be so kind to send to us.

Considering that operational resources are limited, I understand that we have redirected the forces assigned to recruitment toward anything more related to the operational aspect.

As that deprives us of recruits over the long term, was it a mistake?

If so, should the mistake be corrected? Should the forces that have been redirected to the operational aspect be redirected back to recruitment?

[Dr. Christian Leuprecht]

I would say, Ms. Normandin, that the forces are now strongly focused on regenerating the Canadian Armed Forces. The effort being invested is tremendous.

The issue is that the staff shortage is leading to other aspects of the Canadian Armed Forces being neglected. We always have to focus on one aspect or another.

With it comes to regeneration, we are at a critical stage. Failure in that area may destroy the organization. One of the definite issues is a shortage of resources and staff, but I would also say that the procedures are very complicated. It takes 200 days on average for a person to be hired by the Canadian Armed Forces.

How can we be competitive? Even if candidates want to apply, we cannot expect them to be unable to pay their rent for 200 days. They will accept another job as soon as they are offered one.

On the one hand, many of those procedures must be updated; on the other hand, governments and central agencies also impose policies on the organization.