I've served with the reserves as a captain helping units, I've served as a lieutenant-colonel at area headquarters, and I commanded the whole province of Quebec, which had all the reserve forces of that province in it. Then, as deputy commander of the army, of course I had all the resource requirements for the reservists.
There is a fundamental problem when you build the system to meet your regular force people and then ask how we adapt it to the reserves. That just has been proven ineffective—from pay to whatever support they get in the units to, in fact, how they're even being treated and analyzed, when they come back from the same operational theatre, having bled the same as everybody else, but don't necessarily have that all-encompassing framework around them, because the reservist is in Matane and Valcartier is 300 kilometres away.
I think what you may need to be considering is that the forces perhaps have to look first at how to handle the problem with the reserves. How do we give them the support they need? They are now 20% to 25% of our operational troops.
When I went to the reserves in 1971, they were not allowed to shoot their guns—I'm artillery—unless a regular force guy was there, and they still had Korean War equipment. Now they are out there fighting, commanding, and engaged at all levels like our regular force guys, to the extent of up to 25%. That's not an insignificant number. This is not just a couple of guys here and there; these are significant numbers. As an honorary colonel of a regiment, with 200 guys in my regiment I had 49 deployed in Afghanistan. And we have no capabilities—none—permanently to really do it.
We create honorary colonels. We use our own money to pay for transport for guys to get to different places. I would argue that maybe they should reverse the angle of this for once, because they're doing a major study now, a five-year study on reserve and regular forces, trying to integrate the two—which we were doing in the nineties, too—and ask: what do the reserves need to meet the requirement? You can adjust that to the regular force in a heartbeat.
I think that's the way to look at it.