National Defence Committee on April 25th, 2022

[Dr. John Cowan]

The vast majority already come from civilian universities. If you look at the officer corps alone, more than three-quarters come through the direct entry route, which means people were recruited after they had already gotten their bachelor's degree.

Less than 25% come from the regular officer training plan, which includes undergraduates at the military colleges and ROTP undergraduates in civilian universities. The civilian university stream already represents perhaps 80% of the intake of the officer corps.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Over the last decade, several efforts have been made to modernize and strengthen the reserve force, a crucial element of our national security framework. However, after a decade of shifting policy of land force reserve restructuring, “Strong, Secure, Engaged” and the Canadian army's modernization strategy, many reserve units in my province, such as the Rocky Mountain Rangers, remain without a second mission element, hampering their ability to train and respond when called upon for domestic and international deployments.

If the Canadian Forces are looking to recruit new members, would it not make sense to invest in our reserve units?

I'll throw that question out to both of our witnesses.

[Dr. John Cowan]

If you'd like me to start, the problem, as I already indicated in my opening remarks, is that at the moment it's not the intake into the reserves, where the recruiting has been somewhat simplified in recent years after it was rather turgid for a long time. It is what happens if somebody then wishes to move from the reserve force into the regular force.

At one point, General Hillier announced that he was going to try to reform the system so that so-called component transfer could be accomplished in a week. It still takes anywhere between six months and a year and a half. That's completely unacceptable.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Go ahead, Mr. Cormier.

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

I would add to what Dr. Cowan just said. It's a lever at our disposition. If we're able to make it simple to go from one to the other, there's access to communities and there's access to diversity in the reserves that you're not going to get as easily in the regular forces. We need to really fix this bridge between the two sections of the career streams, because that's one of the best places we have to make gains.

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

You listed in your brief, which we still haven't been able to see because it's still at translation, a number of steps and suggestions as to how we can modernize and be more efficient in our recruitment. I'm wondering if you would like to take some time to mention some of those.

[Dr. John Cowan]

I'm sorry, who is your question directed to?

[Todd Doherty, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

We haven't seen your brief, as it's still in translation. You referred to it.

[Dr. John Cowan]

I'll answer very quickly, then, sir. I've touched on the first two points in the brief. The third point in the brief concerned the mindset of the Canadian Armed Forces recruiting group.

There was, however, a fourth point. Even people going the regular officer training plan route are required to select their military occupation much too early. That is to say, they select it at the moment of recruitment, when it would make a great deal of sense—and it makes sense for the Americans, who do it this way—for them to choose their occupation after they know a little more about which military occupation would make sense for them.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Unfortunately, we're going to have to leave it there, Mr. Doherty.

I'm sorry to cut you off, Professor Cowan.

Ms. O'Connell, you have six minutes.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you both for joining us on this study.

Mr. Cormier, you mentioned the updated foreign policy and a defence policy that is well funded. Since this is the defence committee, I want to focus on the defence policy.

Could you elaborate on what you meant by a clear policy or vision you think doesn't exist? I understand the funding point of that, but could you elaborate on where you think this could be improved, more specifically?

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

I wouldn't comment so much on the defence policy as it's being written up, but I think the political community has a big role to play in being proud and being part of the brand that we're putting out there for the Canadian Armed Forces. I think that would go a long way in the recruitment efforts.

The other place where this plays out might have to do with the policy of the government. If you talk more about climate security, and if you talk more about other mission areas that will gather interest from a diverse set of Canadians, I think you're more likely to gain traction than if you focus the brand of the organization on its traditions and so forth.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Thank you.

You spoke about interprovincial movements for employment and family members. In my other role, that is an area I can certainly raise with the minister. Could you elaborate on whether these are provincial interprovincial barriers, or are there specific federal regulations you would highlight, which I can flag and raise?

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

Going back to what I mentioned in the opening remarks, it really comes down to facilitating conversations among provinces. I don't think that it's necessarily about a federal policy needing to be written, but a conversation among partners.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Thank you.

Dr. Cowan, you spoke about data on women. Because we don't have access to your report, can you elaborate on what you were referring to, in terms of data on women in the service?

[Dr. John Cowan]

Yes. When I was still vice-principal of Queen's University, I was one of the seven members of the study group under General Ramsey Withers on the future of RMC in the late nineties. At that time, we were looking at these ratios, and the research strongly supported the notion that if the percentage of women in such an institution, including the American ones, was under 15%, the peer group wasn't large enough to be adequately supportive. A grey zone was 15% to 20%, and anything over 20% was reasonably safe.

When I arrived at RMC, the percentage of women officer cadets was in the low twenties. None of the American service academies, by the way, have yet to get above 20%. Over the first few years that I was there, it got up to about 29%, but then a strange thing happened. We became much more heavily engaged in Afghanistan, and the biases in the broader society obviously produced a situation in which parents counselled their children differently, and the ratio then fell back to somewhat below 25%.

Amongst the women officer cadets, they certainly garnered a higher than pro rata share of all the awards in all of the pillars of their activity, so I had to think a little bit about why this was so. Of course, research strongly suggested that in that 17-year-old to 24-year-old age group, women are more mature than men, so that was explicable. Also, of course, they were very highly motivated.

However, I became concerned about why the ratio was still so low. Queen's University is in the same city. I had at one point been vice-principal of Queen's University, so I thought I'd look at it a little more closely.

I realized that the disciplines in which there are degree programs at RMC didn't cover all of the disciplines at a typical civilian, large university like Queen's. I mapped what we had in terms of numbers onto the same disciplines at Queen's, and I found that using those disciplines and degree programs weighted, we would only have predicted 34% women, because there's still a broad societal bias, which I don't fully understand, about what women ought to do. I took that difference between 34%, and whether it was 28% or 29% or lower twenties, as being essentially, in a way, the military penalty. It did teach me that the appropriate comparison was not those rather too-low ratios and 50% or 52%, or whatever the civilian universities are experiencing, but given that group of disciplines, it was between somewhere in the twenties and the 34%.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, John McKay]

Thank you, Ms. O'Connell.

Madame Normandin, you have six minutes.

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

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Cowan, I will start with you.

You mentioned some sort of pilot project that would fast-track applicants who were on a low security risk list. You said that it was effective, but still, the project didn't last and they didn't go ahead with the program.

Is this symptomatic of resistance to change in the forces? If so, is it really what needs to be addressed first? We could make the best recommendations in the world, but if the forces are not willing to change, it would be pointless to do that. I'd like to know how you feel about this.

[Dr. John Cowan]

That's a really good question. It's partly because the risk aversion comes all the way down from the political sector, where there's a risk of any embarrassment. You're also quite right that some of the risk aversion comes from some of the people in the recruiting group itself, people who to some extent are stranded there and who don't want any of the processes that they've developed, and are strongly married to, to be turned off, even if those processes don't have any very useful product.

It's a combination of risk aversion that comes down from a political level and risk aversion at the lower level. That could be corrected if we did some of the things that Professor Scoppio spoke to you about, in terms of valuing service in the recruiting group, giving it higher scores for promotion and so on, and ending up with a slightly different complement of people who are working in the recruiting group.

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

Thank you very much.

My next question is for you, Dr. Cormier.

You started by saying that successful missions were important to attract more people. It also brings to mind local missions and everything related to Operation LENTUS. During the pandemic, we saw that Operation LASER was very well received.

In the past, I asked Professor Leuprecht the following question.

Would it be appropriate to set up some sort of parallel militia that would be more dedicated to national missions? We know that there will be more and more of them, especially because of climate change. This might be a solution to ensure universality in operations and combat training. It might be more appealing to some individuals who want to be of service but don't necessarily want to be called to fight overseas.

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

Here's what's interesting about that approach. If we had a civilian rather than military approach to dealing with domestic security issues in the event of climate shocks, if I can call them that, we could recruit a wider range of people and introduce them to domestic security without them having to jump directly into the military. The civilian structure could work together with the military structure.

There is tremendous potential indeed. The final argument for moving in this direction is cost. It's much cheaper to have civilians take on certain projects than use the military as the primary resource. The military should always be the last resource to be used. You always need to be prepared for other contingencies. If the military is always available to conduct domestic operations, it loses its ability to act quickly elsewhere in the world.

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

Shouldn't we still leverage the military aspect for its quick response time and operational capabilities, which cannot be outdone by the civilians. This could even be promoted, in a way, to attract more people to a different type of military work.

[Dr. Youri Cormier]

Promoting a different type of military work is just one way to convince more people with diverse personalities and character traits to join the Canadian Forces. Selling the idea that a soldier is someone who gets down on all fours in the mud will not convince cybersecurity and logistics experts and those in all the other areas that make an army work well.

It goes far beyond the 19th-century concept of the soldier that is so heavily ingrained in our vision of today's soldier.

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

You stated that a 2% budget increase could be used to build housing. Is this the approach you envision more for married military personnel who rent, or rather for soldiers who could buy and sell housing built by the forces?