Evidence of meeting #17 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 military.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Emmanuella Lambropoulos Liberal Saint-Laurent, QC
Thank you very much.
Another reason there is an issue with retention and recruitment, as you mentioned in your remarks, has to do with family and the effects that it has on family. I believe you mentioned that as well.
What can the armed forces offer families in order to make the effects of someone's husband or wife being in the forces less impactful and make it easier for them to live a family life as well?
Professor, Royal Military College of Canada, As an Individual
My point was specifically about how in the recruiting centres it's very important that the recruiters highlight those aspects, because there are a lot of supports for families through the forces. These sorts of benefits and these supports are not always highlighted appropriately—again, this is from our research—when a recruiter is speaking to an applicant or a potential applicant.
What you are asking about specifically is a military couple. Did I understand that, or is it just about postings in different parts of Canada?
Liberal
Emmanuella Lambropoulos Liberal Saint-Laurent, QC
It's about the effects that a posting has on the family.
Professor, Royal Military College of Canada, As an Individual
That, I can tell you, is getting worse with this housing market being completely out of reach for most Canadians. The fact that somebody owns a house gives them reassurance that they are okay at least, but if somebody owns a house, say, in Gagetown—and I don't mean that in any way, shape or form as a bad example—and then they're posted to the Toronto area, the difference is going to be huge.
This whole issue of the housing market is going to compound the already difficult task of moving a family across the country.
Liberal
Emmanuella Lambropoulos Liberal Saint-Laurent, QC
Thank you.
Could you just comment on why you believe exit interviews would benefit this process as well?
Professor, Royal Military College of Canada, As an Individual
Absolutely, I'd be happy to enlighten you. When we were doing research on the ROTP, which was requested by RMC, we asked to have access to the exit interviews of cadets who were releasing. We did not want to have names. We clearly asked for the data to be sanitized. We just wanted to get an understanding. That access was denied.
There are some organizations that don't gather exit interviews within the forces. Some do, but then they don't really do anything with them. Then, when somebody wants to do something about them, wants to have a look at them and wants to analyze them as a researcher—we were a team and I wasn't by myself—and that access is denied, to me, that's a red flag. I'm sorry. That's a huge red flag. What is it that you don't want me to see?
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Thank you, Madam Lambropoulos. That brings to an end our first hour.
As in previous sessions, the witnesses have been uniformly excellent and we really appreciate the contributions you have made. Unlike previous witnesses, however, both of you reversed the Canadian decline for the monarchy, I think, so I'm expecting that candidates for queen will be forthcoming.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Again, thank you.
We'll suspend for a few minutes while we re-empanel.
Thanks again. As I said, General Whitecross, it's a delight to see you again.
We're suspended.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Thank you, Mr. Clerk.
This is the start of the second hour in our recruitment and retention study. We have two witnesses with us. Youri Cormier is from the Conference of Defence Associations, and Dr. John Cowan is principal emeritus at RMC.
In no particular order, I'm going to ask for Mr. Cormier's opening five-minute statement and then go to Dr. Cowan's five-minute statement. We'll go to questions after that.
Mr. Cormier, you have five minutes.
Dr. Youri Cormier Executive Director, Conference of Defence Associations
Thank you so much.
Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for the invitation. It's good to see many of you again.
I am Dr. Youri Cormier. I'm an adjunct professor at the Royal Military College of Canada. I also serve as the executive director of the Conference of Defence Associations. We're a national non-profit, non-partisan organization composed of 40 member associations that represent over 400,000 active and retired members of the Canadian Armed Forces.
I want to start by encouraging the Government of Canada to be very ambitious in the modifications it wants to bring to the Canadian Armed Forces. The military should embody what Canada can be rather than merely being a reflection of what Canada is. The higher its aspirations and purpose, the more likely you are to attract the best and the brightest recruits.
If Parliament wants a strong CAF, elaborating a clear, bold and updated foreign policy would be a great start, followed by a defence policy that is resourced and given the means to carry out this vision. Successful missions and nobility of purpose are what make service attractive, and if you have neither of these, you're Vladimir Putin, with mercenaries and conscripts deserting you on all sides.
We find comfort in making comparisons.
That's the big picture. Now I'm going to transition to some more nitty-gritty remarks. It's a bit of a grocery list, so please bear with me as I go through it.
On the subject of culture, we need to answer these questions: What is or what should be the archetypal soldier? Do we really need universality of service? Is a single approach to basic training what we want, or should we develop a greater diversity of entry points to the military and also a greater diversity of what the concept of a soldier should be?
Bullying and misconduct in the armed forces takes root in such a narrow definition of the archetypal soldier. It creates false notions regarding natural endowments and fitness to serve. What starts off as teasing on how one compares to this archetype ends up with escalating increments of dehumanization. Creating more entry streams into the military would focus training on people's strengths rather than exposing their weaknesses to their peers.
Based on my own personal experience teaching at CMR and RMC, I'd say these are places that need a total rethink in order to become the source of the culture we want in the forces, instead of the continuation of one that we don't want.
With regard to recruitment, we know there are enough people knocking at the door. The real issue is getting the right diversity and the right skill set amongst them. Now a quick fix—and this has been alluded to by witnesses prior to me—would be for the CAF to open recruitment to landed immigrants as a fast track to obtaining Canadian citizenship, insofar as appropriate background checks and security assessments are done. This would mean modifying the National Defence Act, as well as the immigration act.
On the subject of advertising, one challenge to this is the political control of the recruitment message. Privy Council oversight can limit the ability of the CAF to create targeted, timely and effective advertising. Are we targeting the right people and the right age group with the right message? Are we using the most up-to-date online methodologies to push out ads towards geographic and demographic targets?
The next set of points I want to bring up are with regard to career flexibility and work-family balance—the new normal, if you will. I think the CAF has had a really hard time adapting to this new normal. Dual-income families are the norm today, and the military can no longer have a staffing model that works best if you have a stay-at-home mom or dad in the equation.
Transitioning in and out of the CAF between reserve forces and regular forces needs to be made easy. A centralized HR database and payroll system would be a great start. Members of the CAF should be kept in this database even if they leave the forces in their early or mid-career on the off chance that they return, unless they specifically ask to be removed. This would minimize the bureaucracy of re-entry.
In fact, we should be encouraging CAF members to gain experience in the private sector. They'll develop the greater originality of thinking and knowledge of state-of-the-art technologies that result from having a very fluid career path, which is the kind of career path that young people today are looking for. It's a tight labour market out there, a race for talent. If you want to be competitive, the CAF needs to be chasing mid- to late-career professionals and commissioning them directly at the rank of major or colonel.
Finally, interprovincial labour mobility barriers limit the willingness of families to move and, by extension, stay in the forces. Through the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, it would be really useful to facilitate professional recognition and exemptions among professional orders for members of the CAF and their families. For nurses, plumbers, you name it, with over 300 professional orders and organizations across the country, there are huge hurdles to interprovincial mobility for the military.
The final point I want to bring is that the recent budget made major announcements regarding the need for more affordable housing in Canada. Military spending can be leveraged to achieve part of this objective, while also potentially helping us upward on the NATO spending target of 2% of GDP. Places like Wainwright and Cold Lake need more homes, but they're not the only ones. The military has land all across the country on which to build homes. In this sense, we can hit two birds with one stone. Access to home ownership would definitely attract young Canadians into service.
I'd like to thank you for your time at this point, and I'll gladly take your questions.
Liberal
Dr. John Cowan Principal Emeritus, Royal Military College of Canada, As an Individual
Good afternoon.
As noted in my brief and its appendix, which have been circulated, my various exposures to recruiting and retention issues stem from my time as principal, RMC, and from my time as a member and chair of the defence science advisory board of Canada, which is now called the “defence advisory board”, as well as my four years as president of the Conference of Defence Associations Institute and some involvement with the reserve army as well.
My brief is in part an update on the defence science advisory board study entitled “Recruiting the Millennial Generation”, which is included as appendix 1 of my brief. I was chair of that study panel and wrote perhaps half of the final report. It was delivered in December 2013. While there has been some modest amelioration of the concerns expressed therein, the progress has been incremental at best.
For recruiting into the regular force, as you've heard from others, the processing times for applications to join are still unacceptably long, causing large numbers of the best candidates to take other offers. As a subset of that problem, the issuing of ROTP acceptances is so late that many good candidates have by then opted for other routes to higher education. These problems don't seem to bother some of the recruiters very much, as some of them see their role as plugging holes with acceptable applicants rather than getting the best people they can.
Reserve recruiting has benefited from some decentralization in recent years, which has somewhat shortened the waiting times, but more needs to be done.
On retention, major irritants are painfully long delays in component transfer between the reserve and regular forces and hugely demotivating training delays for new enrollees. In recent years, economy measures have constrained the formerly quite good access to professional development assistance while people serve. Some older ways of thinking about retention still prevail. Although, to be fair, many carrying out the human resource work in the Canadian Armed Forces today do understand that the best retention device is to be the best possible employer, but there remain additional steps along that road, which should be taken.
Most of the problems I've touched on here and which are treated at greater length in my brief stem from two entirely correctable problems. The first is a pervasive culture of risk aversion, probably reinforced from the top. The second is a dearth of capacity to carry out the work of recruiting and retention, with that dearth being both quantitative and qualitative. Even the most modest risk, such as issuing rapid conditional acceptances to the vast majority of low-risk applicants, could do wonders, but every time such measures are proposed or even tried on an experimental basis they rapidly disappear without a trace.
I'm certainly prepared to respond to questions about any of the 11 major numbered points of my five-page brief or any of the nine recommendations of the 22-page DSAB study, which is appendix 1.
On the important issue of gender balance in the Canadian Armed Forces, and on the experiences of women in the Canadian Armed Forces, I do have some data from my time as principal, RMC, which may be of interest to the committee. These data, from my own studies during the period of 1999 to 2008, were for me a remarkable affirmation of the impressive performance of the female officer cadets in the ROTP program and also explain for me some of the intake ratios we experienced. I'm certainly prepared to comment on those data, as well as answering any questions that fall within my area of competence.
Thank you very much.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal John McKay
Thank you, Dr. Cowan.
The paper Dr. Cowan is referring to is still in translation, so there may be some limitations on your questions.
Mr. Doherty, you have six minutes, please.
Conservative
Todd Doherty Conservative Cariboo—Prince George, BC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our guests.
Mr. Cormier, you mentioned specializing our recruitment to match the skill sets of potential recruits. Are there countries that are doing that right now and that have better recruitment, higher recruitment, than what Canada has? Can you give us examples?
Executive Director, Conference of Defence Associations
I don't have access to that, unfortunately. I do know that one of the models you see elsewhere is choosing to recruit at different ages. In Canada, for example, if we go to RMC, we're going to be focusing our attention on trying to get someone who is in high school or 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds to join the forces, but if you look at other military academies like Sandhurst in the U.K., they're focusing their interest on people who already have a bachelor's degree and who are going to be more early to mid-twenties before they get into the officer training program.
That can have some positive elements as well in terms of maturity, but it also makes use of the civilian universities as a place where people get engaged with greater diversity than you might find at the RMC campuses, for example.
Conservative
Todd Doherty Conservative Cariboo—Prince George, BC
Are the cadet programs and the reserve programs still our main focus of recruitment or advertising for service?
Executive Director, Conference of Defence Associations
You'd have to ask a CMP that.
They are both streams. You're not going to get the bulk of your future officers through RMC. You get them through so many other sources, including civilian universities.
Conservative
Todd Doherty Conservative Cariboo—Prince George, BC
If we have a more concerted effort in our civilian post-secondary educational institutions, we may have a higher diversity of recruits. Is that correct? Is that your testimony?
Executive Director, Conference of Defence Associations
I didn't get your question properly.
Conservative
Todd Doherty Conservative Cariboo—Prince George, BC
That's okay.
Over the last decades, several efforts have been made to modernize—
Conservative
Todd Doherty Conservative Cariboo—Prince George, BC
You made a comment that perhaps, by going outside of military educational institutions and going to civilian post-secondary institutions, we may be able to recruit more and more diverse candidates.
Principal Emeritus, Royal Military College of Canada, As an Individual
May I comment on that?