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.