Public Accounts Committee on April 13th, 2026

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you very much.

I'll move now to Mr. McKinnon. You have the floor for five minutes.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

I'm going to start with Ms. Hogan.

You mentioned that you studied three bases. Could you tell me what the three bases are?

[Karen Hogan]

We visited three bases so that we could cover the navy, the army and the air force when we visited. We went to Esquimalt in B.C., Gagetown in New Brunswick and Trenton in Ontario. Those bases had about 45 buildings across them in which there were quarters, and we looked at a sample of 35. That's where we found that 32 out of 35 needed at least one major repair.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Would you say your data from these bases is fairly representative of the situation at large?

[Karen Hogan]

I'll see if Stuart can add something here, but I can tell you a bit about the three bases. The average age of the buildings was about 60 years old. About 20% of them had not had their inspections in the required time.

This gives you a sense of the three bases, but I'll see if Stuart wants to add to that.

[Stuart Smith, Director, Office of the Auditor General]

I'm happy to add to that.

In terms of the data we looked at for the conditions at those bases, certainly they're representative of the situation at those three locations. We also chose the bases by considering factors such as geographic coverage of bases within the Canadian Armed Forces, covering army, navy and air force, and we engaged with the CAF to look at what would be good representative bases to examine.

We're comfortable saying that the results we observed at those bases indicate the actual situation at quarters at other CAF locations.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Okay. Thanks.

I also note that this study was done from, I think, March 2024 to April 2025. That's a year ago. Do we have any idea of how things may have changed, improved or gotten worse?

[Karen Hogan]

Our period under audit went from April 2023 to March 2025. We released the report in October 2025. Yes, I acknowledge that an entire year has elapsed since we looked at things. In October we got a bit of an update. We saw that there were fewer residential units available than we had seen at the end of March.

The two organizations here can give you much more up-to-date information.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you.

Ms. Fox, when people are assigned to a new base, is it the general expectation that they will find accommodations in the general market around them, or is it the expectation that they will find something on base?

[Christiane Fox]

We respond to the needs we receive. I think there are choices that military members would make about whether they prefer on the base or residential housing outside the base. The training elements are different. It is in the context of their training requirements, but there is a choice. At the moment, about 16% choose to live in CAF residential housing.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

For a place like Esquimalt, you have Victoria, Sidney and that whole area. You have a large area of market-based availability for residences. For someplace like Yellowknife, it's quite different. How does this affect your decisions and the planning for residences?

[Christiane Fox]

That is exactly it. For all of them, there are different market conditions as well. We look at housing allowances in this context.

The review of where the military needs to build is very much based on the availability in a particular area. This is why the partnership with Yellowknife was so important in light of the lack of housing then, as are our big investments now into infrastructure in Yellowknife for multi-purpose facilities for the CAF, for our Joint Task Force North.

We look at the market conditions. We look at availability. We look at need. Where are we going to deploy armed forces? How do we match the work of the housing strategy with that? We definitely put a geographical lens to this before we make determinations about the various builds.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

I don't know if it was you, but someone mentioned 189 units in Yellowknife. This sounds like a lot for Yellowknife, but we have to get to 10,000 units eventually. We'll never get there if we do 200 here and 200 there.

How do we do this? Who is responsible? Whom do we hold accountable for meeting this requirement?

[Christiane Fox]

You're absolutely right that it has to be a multipronged strategy. In terms of the instances in which we're making significant investments, we have 800 new units that are going to be built across locations. In addition, we have several funding sources. To give you a sense of scale, in Gagetown, Valcartier, Kingston, Petawawa and Edmonton, there are about 1,000 units that we will need to build in those locations. In Halifax, Trenton and Esquimalt, we're probably looking at 500. There's a combination of new builds and scale with some quick solutions to offer housing right away. You know, 37 units is not a ton, but it is important for the need we have there now, and it allows us a bit of flexibility.

There are definitely different strategies to address this growing need.

[Ron McKinnon, Liberal, Coquitlam—Port Coquitlam, BC]

Whom do we hold accountable for making sure this is done?

[Christiane Fox]

It's National Defence, with our housing agency.

[The Chair, Conservative, John Williamson]

Thank you.

That is your time, Mr. McKinnon, but there will be a few more spots down the road if you have follow-ups.

We'll begin our third round. Again, we'll have five members with various times.

Mr. Stevenson, you'll kick us off for five minutes, please.

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you to all of our witnesses. I appreciate your coming, and of course, I appreciate the efforts of our military on behalf of our society.

I'll start with Ms. Hogan.

With regard to the audit, you talked about how certain things haven't improved. Was it more of a process that was lacking, or was it more of a following through with the process? When they're looking at the evaluations of housing, would you say they have an adequate process so that they can say, “This is how we judge it, and this is where our needs are”, and they just didn't follow through, or would you say it's more that the process itself is lacking to understand what they need?

[Karen Hogan]

There are many elements that contributed to not having reliable information on the number of quarters and the condition of those quarters. Many of the bases manage this on their own. A global picture is needed so that you can decide how you use the limited resources you have.

For us, it was difficult to see where they tracked maintenance on residential units and the quarters, because of how National Defence would budget for maintenance and repairs. It's the whole organization, so we couldn't zero in and ask them why they did or didn't spend on these quarters. Their budget was about 2% on repair, but they didn't spend all of it. Why they're not spending all of it will be a conversation to have with National Defence.

We saw assessments done, but 26% of assessments were not done on residential units and 20% were not done on quarters. This means a large amount were done, but without a comprehensive picture, you don't know the needs you have. How do you fund it, and how do you decide where to allocate the limited resources?

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Did you have more recommendations for how to improve the process other than having a global picture, considering that, as we've discussed, you can't just add 200 here or 200 there? We have to have a national strategy.

Would you say your recommendations were accepted and we have something going forward as a plan to have specific numbers by specific dates rather than the full 10,000? Are we going to have 200 by the end of June and another 2,000 by the end of this year? We need some dates in order to measure when we're going to accomplish this.

[Karen Hogan]

All of our recommendations were agreed to, but we give the department limited space to respond in our report, as you can imagine. The committee plays a big and important role in this. You get a very detailed action plan when the department comes here, and I would expect you to see some concrete dates and deliverables so that you can hold the department accountable.

What's important in my recommendations is that I've had a tendency since I've been Auditor General not to issue a recommendation that says, “Do what you already committed to doing”, because we'll go through all of this work for a department to say, “Well, we'll continue to do what we're doing.” We really try to drive a change that we hope will help improve how this all goes forward. You'll tend not to see a recommendation that just says, “Go inspect your buildings as you said you would.”

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Thank you.

My next question is for Lieutenant-General Simoneau.

You mentioned the lack of training. You said duty quarters is what you have to use. In your opinion, we've had this goal of expanding our military and adding personnel. Is the amount of housing that we have going to be a limiting factor? What's coming first? It's the cart before the horse. Are we going to get those people and not have them in tents before we get them in training, or are we going to try to get the housing first? To me, we need the additional military personnel, so we have to have them too.

What plan do you see, and what's going to be the limiting factor?

[LGen Erick Simoneau]

Thank you. That's an excellent question. The limiting factor is that we need, just for basic training, 2,000 quarters, beds to host recruits. This comes first, before the other—

[William Stevenson, Conservative, Yellowhead, AB]

Do you have a time frame that you can see, in which this is going to work for the number of recruits to get them in within the next year or two?

[LGen Erick Simoneau]

The CDS has given me the mandate to grow the force, the regular force, to 71,500 by April 2029, so that's what I'm going for. We were at 63,000 four years ago. We closed the gap by 2,000 last year and 2,000 this year. We're at 67,000 as we speak, so we're well en route to meet this number.