Thank you, Mr. Chair.
One thing I want to touch on—and I'm glad you raised this particular recommendation and this particular response.... Fundamentally, what we are trying to get to is that the Canadian Armed Forces are 4,000 trained members below the number they need. In fact, the problem has become worse over the last couple of years. It was about 2,300, and now it's 4,300, or something like that, so it has become worse. These are the numbers that they themselves have said they need.
When the three environments—army, navy, air force—get together, they identify how many people they need and then they pass it over to the recruiting people, and the recruiting people say they don't have the capacity to do that and so they're going to recruit a lower number.
We made a recommendation here—and our recommendations are about needing to put the focus on the individual occupations and all of that type thing—and we get this type of response from National Defence. As you say, when you read that response, you get the feeling that they're essentially saying, “We already have this in place.” That's fine. You think you have something in place. How is any of this gong to be get you to the point of having the number of trained members you need to have?
The department can look at our recommendation and can come back with a response that says either what they're going to do or what they are already doing, but none of it is actually telling you whether any of this is going to get you to that point.
The wait time, if I understand what you're referring to, is the amount of time in the middle of a training program that a person has to wait around for the rest of their training.
Is that the issue? That's the issue that we raise, in terms of the waiting: somebody will come in, and they'll start their training program perhaps, and then they have to wait because the next stage isn't ready, and in some cases they'll wait many months. During that time, the Canadian Armed Forces find something else for those individuals to do. It may be first aid training or those types of things, but it's not training that's getting them trained for their actual occupation and ready to get into that occupation.
Again, they need to find ways of making the training more efficient so that there is less waiting time for the recruits coming in.