Public Accounts Committee on June 7th, 2016

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Only five minutes, Mr. Chair? Thank you. I'm going to try to be brief.

Gentlemen, thank you for being with us this morning.

I think that this exercise is very important. Our role is to see to it that there be methods and processes that optimize the use of taxpayers' money.

Are there any self-assessment mechanisms in your organization or at the Department of National Defence?

I would like to come back again to the fact that when the representatives of organizations come before the Committee on Public Accounts and get slapped on the wrist, they come back 10 years later and present an action plan and recommendations. However, today, in your structures, I don't see any mechanisms that would optimize the use of public funds.

I will give you two examples. We have met with people responsible for military housing who did not even know how many units there were. Is that normal? I'll tell you: the answer is no, that is not normal.

Moreover, the report on the reserve that was tabled today is not reassuring, and the budgets do not match up. You had trouble explaining to my colleague what these figures of 14,000, 18,000 and 21,000 represent. Those people are either there or they are not there. It's confusing. This doesn't generate a feeling of security. And I think that the term is well chosen in this case.

Do you have some sort of internal self-assessment process? In order for us to feel confident, perhaps you should not wait to appear before the committee, and not wait for the Auditor General to come visit you to do an audit.

[LGen Marquis Hainse]

Mr. Chair, thanks for the question.

There certainly is a self-assessment group. Audits are done internally on a very regular basis. The process has existed for several years and will continue to exist. I apologize if I did not provide sufficient clarification as to the numbers. I can certainly go back to that.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

No, we are talking about the process.

[LGen Marquis Hainse]

That's important. In any case, the process exists, Mr. Godin.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

It exists, but is it effective?

Do you assess your systems in order to verify whether they are effective?

[LGen Marquis Hainse]

Absolutely. No recommendation goes without a response. We have to continue to improve them and show that we are continuing to do so in visible ways.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Providing answers is application, but I'm wondering about your administrative rigour. I am not questioning your good will, nor that of the administrative people. I think you do extraordinary things for the members of the military. The men and women who defend Canadians do good work. Without wanting to overstate things, we'd simply like you to maximize your efforts.

I'm going to raise another topic. You said earlier that on April 1, 2016, you created a financial account in the organization to ensure that the funds would be allocated to the reserve. I have a question for you on that.

Are there funds from National Defence that are routed to the reserve to increase budgets without our knowing it? In other words, aside from the sums set aside for the reserve, is money from the National Defence budget transferred and used for reserve equipment?

[LGen Marquis Hainse]

That has certainly happened and it could happen again in future. In fact, the yearly financial process is based on quarterly review periods. At that time, we reallocate resources if that is necessary. In the case you have just referred to, if funding is lacking for the reserve, a request is made and duly approved.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

That measure is in fact an additional step that makes the process more cumbersome. I'll give you an example to illustrate the theory of interconnected vessels.

The Canadian Forces base in Valcartier is in my riding. National Defence invested there to renovate the barracks to house Syrian refugees. As of today, no Syrian refugee has been housed on that Canadian Forces base.

Consequently, the money that was used to update the barracks will be used for the Canadian Army Reserve. Is that money coming from the reserve budget or was it transferred by accident from the Department of Defence budget?

As citizens and parliamentarians, we are mired in confusion. The impression we get is that you don't control the internal administration. However, I am not impugning anyone's intentions.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, Monsieur Godin.

I don't know, Lieutenant-General—

[LGen Marquis Hainse]

I really have no comments to add. You would have to put this question to our chief financial officer, who has the expertise to explain the funds transfer and could explain what accounts they came from.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

What about Mr. Jones? That's perhaps where the deputy, as Mr. Christopherson has pointed out, has been a chief accounting officer of the department. Do you have any comment on that?

[Bill Jones]

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chair. I think it's a good question.

In respect to the specific item of preparing for the Syrian refugees, that was an initiative that was undertaken. We put in place preparations as part of that program, and we expended funds to get ready for the potential arrival of the Syrian refugees.

As it turns out, none showed up. Nevertheless, we were directed to get ready, and that's what we did.

Those particular expenditures and improvements to the infrastructure in Valcartier and elsewhere will not just be used for the reserves; they'll be used for the cadets and others, so they're not assigned to the reserve budget.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you, Mr. Jones.

We will now move over to Ms. Shanahan, please. You have five minutes.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for being here this morning.

I would like to talk about the raison d'être of the reserves. As a civilian, I remember being surprised to learn that reserve soldiers serve on the front line. I guess I had the idea, not knowing any better, that they were in the background. After learning that they're on the front lines and in deployments, particularly internationally, it's even more of a concern to me when I read they are not always trained properly or have the proper equipment. I am concerned about the personal risk to our reserve soldiers when they are serving.

I'd like you to talk a little about the raison d'être for reserve soldiers. Will it always be the case that we rely on reserve soldiers for our front lines, or is this something that has just historically evolved?

[LGen Marquis Hainse]

Mr. Chair, thank you for the question.

Yes, we will always rely on our reserve soldiers to complement the army effort in operation. Every year, and I'd like to reassure you, generic guidance is given as training for the reserve soldiers. They have to reach a certain level of training, and it's focused on the foundation training.

This is predicated on the fact that the additional 37.5 days they will give during the year will complement some of their training. It's also predicated on the fact that if they are deployed on an international operation, they will have pre-deployment training.

We have already established that we might not have kept some of the data up to date in understanding exactly what was done, but I can assure you that every time any organization is deployed on an operation, the commanders have to do an operational declaration directly to me. They put their signature at the bottom that the training indeed has been done, and we have all the details of that generic training that was done by all of the soldiers. When soldiers deploy in an operation, they are as trained as their regular forces counterparts.

[Brenda Shanahan, Liberal, Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC]

Thank you for confirming that this is confirmed in writing, because I think that was a remark we saw in the Auditor General's report. Given that the reserve forces are here to stay, and I certainly commend reservists on their service to the country, I'm concerned about paragraph 5.51 from the Auditor General's report stating:

We found that the National Defence recruiting system did not recruit the number of soldiers needed by the Army Reserve and that the Army Reserve units had difficulty retaining their soldiers.

Please talk to us about that. What are the strategies that are used? Are there new strategies being employed? I'm wondering—and I'm just throwing it out there—if there is a question of morale where reserve soldiers feel like second-class citizens and this is why retention is difficult. I'd like to hear about that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

General Joyce.

[MGen Derek Joyce]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

That's an excellent question.

In fact, we do have two strategies under way right now for the Canadian Armed Forces. One is for retention and one is for recruiting.

To be quite clear, these are strategies that are aimed at both the regular force and the reserve force because we are in a period of accelerated recruiting towards targets in the 2018-19 period. We have targets right now of 68,000 for the regular force and 28,500 for the reserve force in the 2018-19 time frame.

You're absolutely right to bring up both retention and recruiting because they are linked. We have a relatively high attrition rate in the reserves. About 50% of our reservists leave within the first five years, so we have to address that. We're doing that from the military personnel command perspective by targeting a couple of different issues.

First off, we're looking at creating better mobility between the regular force and the reserve force. We find that this is a good retention strategy. The more that our reservists can become regular force, if that's their desire, or our regular force members, for personal or family reasons, want to become reserve forces, if we improve that flow, then we actually improve the retention of both regular and reserve forces. We're working on that process to streamline that.

We're also looking at the compensation and benefit structure for the reserves and the regular force, with the objective of aligning the two and using it as a strategic enabler to have a compensation/benefits structure that is going to be attractive to Canadians to join either the regular force or the reserve force. We're looking at current management as a key element, because that can be either a satisfier or a dissatisfier, regardless of whether you're in the reserve force or the regular force. We're looking at family support, because that's key to retaining any individual in the Canadian Armed Forces.

We're looking at mental health and wellness, of course, and we're looking at diversity. Diversity is a key element. We have to reach out to the less represented members of the Canadian population and bring them in. What we've done in that area, skipping over to recruiting now, is we've actually focused a diversity recruiting team on bringing in elements of the population that are under-represented within the Canadian Armed Forces right now. That strategy—

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Very quickly. We're a minute over.

[MGen Derek Joyce]

I'll speed it up.

That strategy has four phases and we're moving on them.

From the recruiting perspective, we're looking at developing a model for the reserves that is more representative of what we currently use for the regular force. We have a very good structure to map out attrition and demand for the regular force. We are going to bring that same model in for the reserve forces, so we can better predict what our needs are going to be in the future and have a much better understanding of what our recruiting requirements are therefore going to be.

[The Chair, Conservative, Kevin Sorenson]

Thank you very much, General.

We'll now go back to Monsieur Godin.

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

In the part of the report that discusses guidelines on Canadian missions, the Office of the Auditor General noted that the Canadian Army had not drawn up the list of equipment that the entire reserve unit should have to train its soldiers and teams for a mission. That is another problem and I don't understand why you can't do an inventory of the equipment.

The Auditor General also noted that between 2013 and 2015, analyses done after missions in Canada revealed that, in a large number of cases, essential military equipment had been missing, such as reconnaissance vehicles, command posts and communication equipment. Are the reservists the poor relatives of the army?

[LGen Marquis Hainse]

Absolutely not.

Your question was whether the reservists are the poor relatives of the Armed Forces?

[Joël Godin, Conservative, Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier, QC]

Yes.