Thank you for the opportunity to appear today. I'm June Winger. I'm the national president for the Union of National Defence Employees.
Our union represents 20,000 civilian defence workers. Our members ensure that military operations are mission-ready at all times and that military members have safe and secure places to live and work. Our members are experts who work on bases and in offices, laboratories, warehouses, airports and garages. They provide support services so that the military can continue to be agile and combat-ready.
I'm here today to discuss the problem of contracting out, because this is a significant issue that's going on in the department. Through the exposure of the ArriveCAN scandal, Canadians are now—more than ever—aware of the problem of contracting out.
What we've seen over the years is that instead of staffing, DND is relying on an extensive and growing use of external private contractors and using layers upon layers of subcontracting in order to accomplish its mandate, just like the previous speaker was saying.
Our union deals with the consequences of this every single day. We grapple with the understaffing, with the shoddy work that's being done by contractors and with health and safety risks not just to our employees but to military members. I didn't even mention the runaway costs yet. There seem to be countless serious examples that demonstrate how the contracting that's going on is not yielding good results for Canadians.
First, I'd like to take a moment to say a few words about the ongoing strike of our non-publicly funded workers that has been ongoing for 45 days as of today. Even though these members provide key support services to our military and their family members, they are managed as though they are external contractors.
We repeatedly hear that National Defence is not responsible for these workers, and yet 40% of the funding that goes to CFMWS is paid by National Defence. They keep telling us that they're not public servants, but they are public servants: They're just schedule V rather than I. When we go into negotiations, the employer keeps saying that it can't do anything without the approval of National Defence and Treasury Board. It doesn't make any sense.
In fact, when we were in bargaining, at each bargaining unit the CFMWS negotiator was telling the employees that they don't have the money to pay them properly, and the only way to get that money from National Defence is for them to go on strike, so here we are on day 45. While these members are on strike, they've been bringing in casuals: hiring people to come in and do the work while this government has anti-scab legislation in front of them, and now we know that military members are also being assigned to do the very work of these strikers. It's clear that this arrangement with CFMWS doesn't make sense and doesn't work.
It's important to remember that not only are military spouses a significant portion of these workers, but that the core aim of their work is to provide support to the military and their families, the very support that ombudsman Gregory Lick referenced to this committee just days ago: that they're needed to address the retention issues in the Canadian Armed Forces.
What's going on with CFMWS is just the tip of the iceberg. The sheer volume of contracting out that we are seeing, the unchecked contract amendments, extensions and ballooning costs, the lack of oversight and quality control and the major errors and total failures in certain contracts don't seem to indicate that contracting out is being used at all as it has been intended. In this committee, we've heard officials state that contracting out should be used only as a temporary stopgap and for surge capacity, but in reality, that's not at all how DND uses it.