Evidence of meeting #16 for National Defence in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was issues.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
We're going to have to leave it there, unfortunately, Madame Normandin.
I take note of that study you referenced, Professor Leuprecht. In the event that you have not already submitted it at some previous point in your appearances before this committee, I'm sure we'd appreciate it. Thank you for that.
You have five minutes, Ms. Mathyssen.
NDP
Lindsay Mathyssen NDP London—Fanshawe, ON
Thank you so much.
Ms. Winger, you spoke a lot about the outsourcing of work on base and you gave a couple of examples, one about the unfit living conditions because of poor cleaning and one in terms of the medical facility.
Can you provide more examples or expand on how privatization has impacted specifically the health and safety of workers within DND and CAF?
National President, Union of National Defence Employees
Thank you for the question.
Certainly I can. I can give an example from when the pandemic was first called in. I can tell you that the Department of National Defence worked really hard at making sure that all the employees and military members were safe. We worked really well together. There was a great deal of consultation and we put in all the processes we needed to make sure that safety was the number one priority.
It wasn't the same for those employees who were contractors. I can tell you of contracted employees at a particular base who were being told they still had to continue to come into the workplace. They still had to continue to do different duties that weren't their regular duties because those were no longer required due to the lower manning that was happening as a result of the pandemic. They weren't given any safety gear. These employees, these contractors, were putting their lives at risk, and they were literally putting the employees of National Defence and the military members' lives at risk as well because they were acting almost as a conduit. If one of them were infected with the virus, they would have easily been spreading it at that point.
We had to work very hard with National Defence and with the contractors to try to get that addressed. In most cases, we were successful, but in a couple, we weren't. We're just very lucky that we didn't see any catastrophic results from that.
NDP
Lindsay Mathyssen NDP London—Fanshawe, ON
Of course, that would impact morale among troops and among workers.
Can you talk about how that impacts retention as we're going forward in this study?
National President, Union of National Defence Employees
Certainly.
That sent a very strong signal to the colleagues. When we're at National Defence, we do have a family feeling. We do feel that we have a tight-knit group as we work with each other. Whether we are contractor [Technical difficulty—Editor] or military members, we are all on the same team and working together.
It was very obvious when we were seeing that one group was treated so very poorly as opposed to the others. That was hard on everybody, not just the contractors. It was hard on those employees because people didn't want to get into a position where they would be calling out the contractors and telling them that they shouldn't be there. They didn't want to be putting in complaints, but their failure to do so was risking their own health.
NDP
Lindsay Mathyssen NDP London—Fanshawe, ON
In terms of outsourcing and that privatization side, that has increased quite significantly. Can you explain specifically why? I think you touched on it terms of the changes in budgets and how bases are run, but could you explain that a bit more?
National President, Union of National Defence Employees
We have our salary wage envelopes at National Defence. That is money the department is given just to maintain their public servants. However, they also have money through the operations and maintenance budget, and they often have more money in there. It's easy for them, then, to just contract out work where they have this other pile of money, rather than going after increasing the suite to an appropriate level for what they need. Then you end up in situations—just like the previous speaker was commenting on—where you have these massive shortfalls at the workplace and you become very reliant on contractors to pick up the work that needs to be done.
That doesn't always work. In fact, that rarely ever works. It certainly is not the most cost-effective way of doing it. We usually end up having to pay more money, and we're not getting the services we need and certainly not when we need them.
Professor, Royal Military College, Queen’s University, As an Individual
Ms. Mathyssen, if I may, I'm currently on a hiring committee for professors at RMC. At a civilian university, this takes three months. At RMC, it takes us 18 months, from flash to bang, to hire a new professor—six times as long. I'll leave it at that.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Thank you. It's flash-bang hiring.
Mr. Motz, you have four minutes for the second round.
Conservative
Glen Motz Conservative Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
“Flash-bang” was the term we used with the tactical team, and I don't want to go back to those sounds and sights.
Professor Leuprecht, you mentioned something in your opening remarks. You called it the “missing middle”. You explained that we need to fix it quickly. How do we fix it quickly? Can you expand on the danger that the missing middle poses to our military's readiness to protect our country?
Professor, Royal Military College, Queen’s University, As an Individual
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.
Conservative
Glen Motz Conservative Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB
Thank you for that, Professor.
I certainly agree with the need to reconsider and rethink how we deploy our Canadian Forces personnel. When I talk to young people in my riding and people who are interested in the military, the last thing they find attractive in the Canadian military is the need to overfocus on the domestic emergencies that the armed forces are currently looking at. I did appreciate some of your thoughts.
If you were in charge, Professor, what's the most important thing, the one thing you would consider recommending to this committee that would be impactful in increasing recruitment and retention? Where would you go with that?
Professor, Royal Military College, Queen’s University, As an Individual
Luckily, Mr. Motz, I'm a prof, so nobody will ever put me in charge of anything. That's the [Inaudible—Editor] thing about the organization.
Conservative
Professor, Royal Military College, Queen’s University, As an Individual
Look, I have all the admiration in the world for the many people who are really trying to make this work, but I do think it takes far too long to get people into our system, and it takes too long to get people through the training system. This is where Ms. Winger's comments are really important, because what we forget is that if you want to train people, you need facilities that are appropriate for that. Many of these facilities.... Look at DND and the hundreds of buildings and thousands of kilometres of roads, or the 50-year-old culverts in Gagetown that were washed out in 2015 or 2016—I have it in my testimony from last week—which basically imperiled training operations in Gagetown for over a year.
You need those cooks. You need exactly the people who are part of Ms. Winger's organization. You need the bus drivers to ferry people from their dorms to the training operations. That's where we're having critical shortages of people within the training system.
Liberal
Liberal
Emmanuella Lambropoulos Liberal Saint-Laurent, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to both of our witnesses for being here to answer some of our questions today.
Mr. Leuprecht, you mentioned that a lot of the recruitment and retention policies put in place are very out of date. I was wondering if you could be a bit more specific as to which ones need to go and whether or not you know of any systems outside of Canada with good recruitment and retention that we should maybe look to during this study.
Professor, Royal Military College, Queen’s University, As an Individual
I would say it's less about which policies per se need to go, but the ability to actually.... If you're putting people in the training system, it means that those people aren't there to modernize your policies. Part of this is a staffing issue; there are only so many people to go around to do this. I'm happy to provide some more details to the committee afterwards.
There are literally hundreds of policies that need to be updated, not because the organization doesn't want to update them, but because it doesn't have the staff to do that. However, when you update them, it takes months or years to percolate through the system, the central agencies.
This is why I was saying that one thing this committee needs to urge Treasury Board to do, and the President of the Treasury Board, is that when a DND policy submission comes to them, it must receive priority treatment. It can't take weeks or months to percolate through the system, because that further imperils the system.
Different countries have different employment conditions, so I think it's not that easy to compare to other countries. You might look, for instance, at a country such as Sweden, which has recently scaled up pretty substantially on reconstituting its force. That was already before the Russian revisionism in Ukraine.
I think we need to look at countries that have similar values and similar objectives to our own. For instance, the Netherlands is a country that frequently gets lost in the shuffle and conversation. I think if you also look at Australia—a country that has consistently spent 2%—it's about two-thirds of our population and two-thirds of our economy. However, because of the security environment that Australia has to live in, with half of the world's population within 500 miles of its coast, it has paid much closer attention to these issues.
Liberal
Emmanuella Lambropoulos Liberal Saint-Laurent, QC
Can you also comment a little [Technical difficulty—Editor] whether you believe that PRs should be given a little more flexibility? Under certain conditions, they're able to apply for the armed forces, but generally speaking, it's reserved for Canadian citizens.
Do you think that if Canada were to open it a bit more and allow more PRs to join, we would have less of an issue, a little bit more interest, or at least a better time attracting more people?
Professor, Royal Military College, Queen’s University, As an Individual
There are certainly countries that use permanent residency conditions as an expedited mechanism to obtain citizenship. I think as long as that doesn't compromise our ability to obtain proper security clearances and to do proper resilience assessments on the individuals who join, I would certainly favour a system where people who demonstrate their loyalty to this country through service to the Canadian Armed Forces have an expedited route to Canadian citizenship.
Liberal
Emmanuella Lambropoulos Liberal Saint-Laurent, QC
I'm not sure how much time I have left, Mr. Chair.
Liberal
