That's a great question.
It may in a sense be a command and control problem from the army side, but I think there's also an issue of making sure that rangers are validated in the contributions they're making. We don't do enough celebration of the Canadian Rangers.
I believe the statistics that Dr. Scoppio was referencing a couple of times are Canadian Army statistics that often exclude the Canadian Rangers, as a recent census of Canada did, saying, “Please identify if you serve or have served in the Canadian Forces, except with the Canadian Rangers.” What message are we sending when we exclude indigenous people who are choosing to serve our country by staying in their communities and sharing their expertise and knowledge in a differentiated form of service?
From the army standpoint, at least in the 1st Canadian Ranger Patrol Group, where I have very close relations, I hear repeatedly not that they need more equipment or a change in their overall role, mission and tasks, but that they need more opportunities to go out on the land. They need faster processing of their pay and their damage claims. They want more opportunities to put on their ranger hoodie, their ranger ball cap and whatever appropriate clothing they have for the environmental conditions at that time of year in their part of Canada, and to go out and do more things.
This goes back to Ms. Gallant's question at the beginning: How do we increase enrolment? Partly, it's celebrating the rangers and drawing more attention to their value within the Canadian Armed Forces system and how their role as force enablers and force multipliers is valued, is key to Canadian security. It has a deterrence effect as well, because it enables us to economically, with a utility of force, defend our homeland.
At the same time, we can also reduce some of the burdens associated with the onboarding of recruits. What Dr. Scoppio was referring to for the regular force and primary reserves also exists for the rangers. What's crushing a lot of the process of bringing in new rangers is the sheer volume of paperwork that's been introduced over the last 15 years.
One of the downsides, to get back to your question, Mr. Paul-Hus, is that we sometimes associate increasing command and control with more accountability and more administrative burden. In the case of the rangers, as long as we're building in the right mechanisms to, of course, refine command and control.... At the same time, we must make sure that for the rangers, at the end of the day, we're providing them with more opportunities to do what they've been doing for more than 75 years, to get on the land even more and to showcase to Canadians and our friends and adversaries around the world what they bring to the table in terms of defending our country.