This is your junior leadership and management cadre that ultimately needs to bring your organization along. That's the cadre you're relying on to make operations happen and do a lot of that sustainment and maintenance. It's heavily engaged in the regeneration component of the force. Because of the shortages, there's all the more pressure and tax on those individuals who stay. You can see how this becomes a particular challenge, because in addition to all the other challenges that come with serving in the CAF family and so forth, you now have exceptional pressure on that missing middle.
How do you protect that missing middle? How do you move those individuals along? How do you make sure that, as we come back behind, we have a systematic strategy to backfill for that missing middle? We got ourselves there precisely because we didn't have the resources, the time and the capabilities to focus on regeneration. We used that missing middle to focus disproportionately on making sure we deliver on Government of Canada operations. That works for a short period of time, but after a while you wear out the organization to where we are now.
As a result of the pandemic.... You don't have recruitment shortfalls per se. What you have is training shortfalls, because the organization in 2021 was only able to bring in about half the people it normally would—not for lack of interest, but for lack of capacity to actually get these people through recruitment and through the training system. The pandemic has added to the challenges.