Public Accounts Committee on Dec. 3rd, 2018

[Stephen Fuhr, Liberal, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you for that.

Are there any considerations when you get that bucket of things you'll be looking at as to what would be ported onto the new airframe when we get our new airframe? For example, if we had a new air-to-air missile, for example, we could move that over, but if we had some defensive EW kit that was inside the airplane, that might not. Is that going to play a role in how you will decide what you'll go with and what you won't?

[LGen A. D. Meinzinger]

I think, ultimately, that will be one of the key factors, the portability, if you will, the transferability. We'll also look at the time and space and we'll also look at perhaps the number of aircraft we would consider under that program.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

You have 30 seconds left.

[Stephen Fuhr, Liberal, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

I'll have to leave it there. I don't have time. I'd get a question and then I'd get shut down. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

We'll get back to you. Thank you.

Ms. Alleslev.

[Leona Alleslev, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Thank you very much.

I'd like to talk a little bit more about the training as well.

We've known since 1995 that we were going to have a shortage of technicians and of pilots. We did studies. We forecasted how commercial aviation was going to take.... The aerospace industry has known what the increase in pilot demand would be, so this is not a surprise. We've known it for very many years. We also knew we had a demographic problem. The problem with airlines has always been cyclical, so we've known they steal from the air force and we've had to plan around that. We're in the same situation.

Can you tell us why, when we've known at least since 1995, we haven't done anything about it, and what confidence we should have now that we will do things differently to ensure we have the technicians and pilots?

[LGen A. D. Meinzinger]

If I may, certainly this is absolutely important work. One of my top priorities—this is not going to be easy—is to put it in the context of the global challenge we face, but we will embark on this. My team is fully motivated. I had all of my general officers here in town—

[Leona Alleslev, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Again, in 20 years, though.... Today it's your top priority, and I'm excited and I know that you're new as chief of the air staff, but we have 20 years, and even before that we've known.

What are we doing differently now and why should we have confidence that we'll achieve the capability?

[LGen A. D. Meinzinger]

I think, as I indicated, sharing with you the principal reasons people choose to leave the Canadian Armed Forces is a great algorithm to look at how we make improvements within the air force—

[Leona Alleslev, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Have those reasons changed?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

We have to let him finish the answer first.

[Leona Alleslev, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Perfect.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Go ahead, General.

[LGen A. D. Meinzinger]

Okay.

Again, there have many initiatives. Some are in play. I talked about the reserve one. Let me talk about that for a bit. I think there's a tremendous opportunity for us to leverage our air reserve to a greater extent than we are today. We currently have 2,000 reservists in the RCAF. I've set an aspirational goal of 2,550. We're putting in place two new occupations, one at the officer level, one at the NCM level.

Let me explain that briefly. The officer level classification is going to be what we call air operations. These individuals will be principally working in the wing, the division headquarters, running the staff and operational planning functions. Traditionally, we've had to pull our pilots into those staff jobs. By standing up this particular capability, this new classification, we're going to see more pilots able to continue to fly at the squadron level. There's but one example of the numerous ones that we're implementing.

[Leona Alleslev, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

Can you tell us if the trend is increasing or decreasing? We have a 22% shortage. What was it five years ago? What are you forecasting it will be five years from now, from a technician perspective and from a pilot perspective? We're not replacing the ones we're losing and we're already short, so can we see where that trend is going? I know the military keeps meticulous stats on that.

[Patrick Finn, Assistant Deputy Minister, Materiel, Department of National Defence]

Thank you.

If I could just speak specifically to the maintainers, what we're doing.... You talked earlier about the exponential rate of maintenance. It's not quite exponential that we're seeing. A lot of it's at the third line. A lot of this is how we're now using industry. Specific to this fleet and this aircraft, we've already taken a big step. We've generated almost 200 first-line maintainers by looking at how we do industry, how we use it at the second line, like we do in the navy, and to some extent in the army. We're looking at that in new fleets. We've looked at it across fleets: the C-17, how we maintain it, how we're doing the Cyclone, how we're bringing things in.

You're right. There are trends and there's a complexity around a military maintainer and everything they need to do. It's causing us to look through something we've called the sustainment initiative: how we're sustaining all the fleets, what really needs to be uniformed maintainers and what really could be a civilian experienced maintainer, who actually are more efficient as far as time on aircraft goes. That's what we see. That is really actually helping us on the maintainer side to change the trend, to actually be able to build the right first-level deployable maintainers, as you would be aware, while we have the rest of the enterprise at the appropriate place, be it industry or otherwise.

[Leona Alleslev, Conservative, Aurora—Oak Ridges—Richmond Hill, ON]

We outsourced our training sovereignty by having training that was once delivered by military capability now delivered by civilian capability, which constrains our ability to train rapidly. I wonder if you could speak to how we're going to address that.

Likewise, by outsourcing maintenance capabilities, will that also compromise our combat capability, since we won't have those uniformed personnel to do that maintenance?

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

It has to be very quick because we're close on our time.

[Patrick Finn]

We have always relied heavily on industry. A lot of the intellectual property in the work has always been there, certainly for our most complex platforms. A lot of that is now done in Canada by the likes of L3 and IMP, which have always been critical, right back to World War II and before, in the context of the military supply chains and how we support our equipment.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Mr. Finn.

We'll now move to Ms. Yip, please. You have five minutes. We're in the second round, so it's a little quicker.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

Thank you all for coming.

With all of these critical shortages of labour, will there be enough budget, first, to retain pilots and technicians; second, to upgrade training; and third, to allot for the increase in the maintenance hours?

[Jody Thomas]

Thank you very much for the question.

The budget is not an issue. “Strong, Secure, Engaged” has fully budgeted for the number of pilots we need, the number of technicians we need and the amount of money required to run the Royal Canadian Air Force. That's not our issue at this time. It is getting the number of people in place, as the Auditor General has commented.

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

There are often financial barriers to becoming a pilot. Alberta has a pilot program, which is only 18 months, compared to three years in other provinces. They also provide a $50,000 scholarship. If the training costs $80,000, then students only have to pay $30,000. I am just wondering how the Department of National Defence can help reduce financial barriers to the programs for pilots?

[LGen A. D. Meinzinger]

I'm sorry. I'm not familiar. This is a community college in Alberta. Is that correct?

[Jean Yip, Liberal, Scarborough—Agincourt, ON]

It's a flight school.