Again, thank you, Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Ferguson, and our guests. We appreciate your being here.
For the wise deputies and other entity leaders, I hope they were paying attention when we said that we're picking up on the issue that the Auditor General had raised early in this Parliament, and that is the issue of data and the fact there's still not the priority that there should be on the quality of data, the timeliness of data, and the analysis of it.
We're spending an enormous amount of money in government very effectively putting together the processes for collecting this information. In the real world we're not doing much with it, certainly not as well as we can, and it would seem that this report is no different.
I looked at the Auditor General's opening remarks, “It is critical that National Defence has information on whether soldiers are qualified for deployment.” There are a number of aspects of this we're examining today. He went on to say, “However, the system that records this information indicated that a high percentage of army reserve soldiers did not hold the required qualifications.” Well, that's disappointing, and we can talk about why this is and what you're going to do about it, but to me, the key thing is the next sentence which says, “National Defence told us that the information from this system could not be relied upon.” Again, if we're going to use these analyses as assumptions and then move on those assumptions, but the analysis is inadequate, basically we're building a house of cards that's going to fall.
I ask the Auditor General to jump in if I'm getting this wrong in some way.
The Auditor General said on page 9 of his report:
It is critical that the Canadian Army know whether its soldiers are prepared to deploy for domestic and international missions. However, we found that the information system used by the Canadian Army to verify the status of individual soldiers showed that soldiers had low levels of current qualifications.
That's in the main report. He's emphasizing his remarks today because the answer that he got from you folks was, “Oh well, don't worry about that information, it's not accurate.”
Talk to me about that, please.