National Defence Committee on April 25th, 2022

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

I think those are both viable options. It depends on the availability of housing. If we have a shortage, we can't do either of those things well, but if we build it we will have the luxury of flexibility.

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

Fair enough.

Mr. Chair, I don't believe I have enough time left to ask another question. I will save it for the second round.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Ms. Mathyssen, you have six minutes.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Again to pick up on the housing questioning, in terms of what you were discussing, are there any studies or further readings in terms of that housing idea that could be offered? Could you expand on what you were specifically talking about? You said that it would have to be built on base. Is this something that's been suggested before? Could you expand on that, Mr. Cormier?

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

Obviously, if you're building new housing for the military, what you're actually doing is allowing a bit of an offset to other places in the city where the arrival of military might increase the demand for housing. I'm not suggesting that this is a complete game-changer, but it is one of the little levers that we have at our disposition to make positive impacts on the housing crisis. Mostly, it's also an element that can play into this game of attracting people into the armed forces.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

One of the comments that we heard before was the removal of the post living differential. Could either of you could talk about whether its reinstatement would be—if not a game-changer—helpful in terms of how the armed forces are trying to move and those expectations of members having to live in different places throughout their careers.

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

This one is over to John since he brought it up.

[Dr. John Cowan]

Actually, I hadn't talked about the differential, but certainly, during much of the time that I was involved with people being posted from one place to another, it was in place and it was highly useful. I certainly see the value in making it more prominent.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

Professor, you had noted, when you were talking about that risk aversion, that there are now a lot of negative stories out in the media and in the Canadian news about the armed forces. Does that drive up that risk aversion, or do you feel that the armed forces could double down? Could you comment on that sort of progression to where we find ourselves now?

[Dr. John Cowan]

The risk aversion that I was speaking of is not really related to the issue of negative publicity of the type that exists now. It's a risk aversion about embarrassment due to possible individual cases of making a mistake in judgment. That's a problem that has become, I would say, rather more pervasive in all of government than Canadians are completely comfortable with. I don't think it's uniquely confined to the recruiting process within the armed forces.

However, there is a sufficiently severe problem with the armed forces that some political top cover...to say, “Just go ahead and take a few risks. If we get a little bit embarrassed here and there, that's fine. Just do your job, get better people, get more diverse people and get them now. If the odd ones have to be released after being in for a little while, because when the security clearance is finally processed it turns out that they wouldn't pass, big deal.”

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

I was going to add that, if you're going to make little changes and reports that add up year after year...and this is one of the issues that came out in the news today, this frustration that these little changes don't add up and that the reports aren't getting implemented. If you want to make changes to this institution, you need to create shock treatments. You need sudden influxes of change, and you need that strong leadership and political oversight of the institution. If you just let it slide, one report at a time, it's going to get shelved.

You're not going to make an omelette unless you break a few eggs. I don't think we're there yet. I don't think there's that willingness to take that extra risk. You're not going to get it necessarily through the ranks, but if the political element forces down the question, you'll get somewhere.

[Dr. John Cowan]

There's one other thing which could help, if I could just add, and that's parallel processing. Rather than taking a candidate, checking one thing, then putting it further down the pipeline and checking another thing, and on and on, doing all those steps at one time, rather than waiting for each one to be cleared before you start the next one, would gain us a lot of time.

[Lindsay Mathyssen, NDP, London—Fanshawe, ON]

One of the other ideas that has come before us is the idea of specialization, bringing in people from the private sector and ensuring they have those careers throughout the armed forces. Would there be a potential backlash, though, from those career military members who have worked their way through that seniority process? Do you see that as a problem or more overall as a positive?

Just a quick analysis of that from both witnesses would be great.

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

I'd argue that it's a solution, rather than a problem. If it hurts people along the way or frustrates people, that's too bad. I would take it up a notch. There needs to be an equalization of opportunities within the organization.

For example, if you had the pleasure of studying at RMC, you had access to almost 600 hours' worth of French language training or English language training. You don't get that if you arrive on a direct entry route. Maybe in some cases where there is potential and you have really great candidates, we should be pushing them toward language training to give them that chance to progress rapidly through the forces.

It's one of the reasons why people complain nowadays that when you look at very senior ranks, you see people who are all.... It's not all but many of them. There is an overrepresentation of former RMC cadets. People look at that and say that it's an old boys' club, or it's an incestuous kind of relationship that leads to promotions. However, there is that language element that people are forgetting to analyze as part of that progression.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Ms. Mathyssen.

Ms. Findlay, you have five minutes to crack a few eggs.

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

Dr. Cormier and Dr. Cowan, thank you very much for being here.

Dr. Cormier, the CDAI undertook a study on recruitment and retention. Is that correct?

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

Yes.

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

Were there any findings in your research that showed the composition of Canadian recruits to be any different from our NATO or western equivalents?

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

That was not really the topic.

The one report that you're referring to, which we did recently, gauged to what extent the new cycle of what people have been reading in the news around the CAF in the past two or three years has generated a decrease in the propensity to serve and recommend service. We found some demonstration that we need to do a better job weeding out problems and telling a positive story, if we're going to make sure that Canadians want to take part in the CAF.

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

You addressed some of that in your opening remarks. Thank you for that.

Were there any basic assumptions you made that held up against your research? Did you find your research different from those assumptions, or did you more or less find it consistent?

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

For that I'd have to submit the report to the committee. This was a report that was not written by me and it was written two years ago, so I'm having a hard time recollecting the details of it.

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

Could you table that report with the committee, please? Thank you.

Do you think the current path being taken on reform now in the Canadian Forces will lead to a combat-ready force?

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

There's a long way to go, but I think you have the right pieces.

What we need to start thinking about is how we change the entry level to make sure that we're not perpetuating a culture that we don't want to see in the Canadian Armed Forces. There are a few ways to do this, and I'll give you an example. This is one thing that really upset me when I was teaching at RMC. I would have young women cadets come to my office and say, “I'm not staying the course. I'm going to get out of the forces in the next couple of years.” I never got that from my male students.

There is an anecdotal element to it that's not a statistically significant piece, but I tried to figure out where it was coming from. There was the sense that you don't get it in other professions. I've never met a women engineer who says, “It's such a male-dominated domain that the culture is unbearable. I want out.” What's happening in other male-dominated careers is that performance is measured objectively, whereas when you go to the military, you wind up with a performance measure that is not always objective. I'm looking specifically at the physical training systems and physical training exams, which are measuring upper body fitness or your capacity to do push-ups, for example.

When you're measuring these male-dominated qualities, rather than things like agility, endurance and those gender-neutral physical traits, you're creating an unfair premise of what it means to be a soldier. I'll give you an example. It takes 38 push-ups for women and 77 push-ups to get the right score. What happens behind the scenes is that you have these students getting a sense that they are twice the soldier that someone else is on campus, because they had to do twice as many push-ups to get that excellent score.

We were talking about royalty in the previous hour. If you want to get treated like royalty at RMC, you have to get 450 points on your physical test. You'll be part of the 450 club, you'll get a t-shirt, and the people who work in the physical training department will befriend you. There's a sense that you're very special if you're very good at this. When I was around, it was mostly young guys who were winning it.

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

I think where there are physical requirements—and there are in many career paths—this is something for which other places have sought some modifications to be more reflective. Having said that, would you agree that the reforms being undertaken still need to be geared to war fighting and combat readiness?

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

I think you have to have a very wide concept of what fighting readiness means, because someone in SOFCOM and someone in logistics don't necessarily need the same skill sets. When you want to recruit the best and the brightest cyber-soldiers, you don't necessarily want to recruit someone who's right out of high school, but someone who has demonstrated their strengths and capacities later in their career and who's working in the private sector and has access to all of this talent.

We are losing the talent game on cyber in a very big way, but there are remedies to this. Whether it's creating external hubs.... We see it in Russia all the time. It's not necessarily people who are working for the government, but working in parallel institutions. Whether or not we want to create this kind of setup or something a bit more directly within the armed forces, we still need to completely rethink how we're doing recruitment for this kind of skill set. It's something that you can't just take for granted.

This is a larger problem with the Canadian Armed Forces. We imagine people with this 30- or 40-year career plan, and we think we can take anyone who's very young and we'll train them to wherever we need to take them. The reality is we can't think that way—