Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon. I want to thank the committee for inviting me here today to discuss recruitment and retention in the Canadian Armed Forces. I am joined, as you said, by Robyn Hynes, my director general of operations, and we are pleased to be with you over the next hour to provide you some sense of those issues, based on the evidence we have found.
While this is my first appearance before this committee in the 44th Parliament, I have already had the pleasure of meeting many members of this committee in person one-on-one, and I look forward to meeting the remaining members in the near future.
As you have likely already heard, the issues surrounding recruitment and retention have many factors affecting them.
From a recruitment perspective, there are a number of reasons why individuals choose or choose not to join the Canadian Armed Forces. There are also a number of reasons why the Canadian Armed Forces cannot connect with and recruit certain Canadians into their ranks.
Additionally, aside from medical release or release for disciplinary purposes, an individual member of the Canadian Armed Forces may leave the forces for any number of reasons. But when you group these reasons together, patterns begin to emerge, and issues of a systemic nature begin to reveal themselves. Over the last 23 years of this office's existence, we have followed these issues closely, and have made recommendations to the Canadian Armed Forces on how they can address these issues moving forward.
I want to take this time to discuss some of the themes that we are currently examining and plan to examine in the near future that directly affect recruitment and retention.
Last June, I held a press conference addressing the ongoing issues surrounding misconduct in the military and the department. During that press conference, I stated that the Canadian Forces grievance system is broken. I will hold that position until I see that there is a long-term solution to what are clearly some deep issues that revive the long delays every time after a quick fix to address the backlog.
As I have told many of you, our office is in a unique position to make this determination. We are sometimes called an office of last resort. This means that we typically refer people back into the grievance system until those mechanisms have been exhausted, or unless there are compelling circumstances. What I can say firmly is that we are intervening in more cases earlier in the grievance process, and this is a troubling trend.
The grievance system is the principal recourse mechanism that a Canadian Armed Forces member has to address unfairness or seek a resolution to a variety of situations. However, members can face significant delays in the grievance process. For some, these delays can lead to financial hardship, physical and emotional stress, relationship breakdown and worse. Recently, I have had to involve myself in two grievance files, one that was over nine years, and another over four years. My office has since received a response to our query related to all grievances that are delayed, broken down by grievance type and length of delay. This response provides a clear picture of the number problem, but it does not reveal the reality of why this is occurring.
As I stated to the chief of the defence staff in two letters sent in late 2021, I strongly believe that the fix to the grievance system is both people and process. Unfortunately, many of the fixes we have seen thrown at the system over the decades have only provided a surge capacity of people to bring down the backlog.
The underlying problems in the grievance system are daunting, but failure to act on them in a meaningful way will only continue to erode trust in the system. Like many before them, many more CAF members with promising careers ahead of them will walk out the door as a result of inaction. It is discouraging that some of the issues we continue to identify with the chain of command were raised by the first ombudsman between 1998 and 2005. The cycle continues.
Simple fixes, such as addressing the fact that the chief of the defence staff has very limited financial authority to address an unfairness for a CAF member, makes absolutely no sense.
From a retention perspective, any prospective member of the Canadian Armed Forces should know that, if they face an issue during their time in uniform, there is a system in place that works. Currently, that cannot be guaranteed, and this will have an impact on keeping people in the armed forces.
Following this theme of trust, we also need to ensure we are making the institution stronger by guaranteeing the independence of its arm's-length bodies. The sexual misconduct response centre, SMRC, our office and other military and civilian authorities need to be protected against the possibilities of outside influence and even the perception of it. Without additional measures put in place to solidify this independence, trust will continue to erode.
On a second theme, we are all aware of the culture crisis that the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National Defence now suffer. Stories about misconduct continue to drive the news cycles. As a result, we know that talented, well-trained people have left the Canadian Armed Forces because they were directly affected by these stories, or as a result of how the military responded to them. Though difficult to measure, this has likely impacted recruitment as well. The overall culture in the military, including its initiatives to promote inclusion and diversity within its ranks, continues to suffer.
Though we have seen promising organizational changes, such as the standing up of the chief professional conduct and culture, we are far from seeing the results of anything that would constitute substantial change on the horizon.
