Mr. Chair, I would like to return to recruitment and retention. Despite numerous recruiting or retention efforts, a number of military occupations remain short of personnel. These include professional occupations, such as doctors and pharmacists, and operating occupations, such as naval electronics, technicians, signal operators, fire control systems technicians, airborne electronics sensor operators, naval weapon technicians and intelligence operators.
Indications are that intake estimates will not be sufficient to recover the above military occupations to the preferred manning level within two years. Recruiting and retention of some of these occupations will remain problematic in the foreseeable future for a variety of reasons, such as elevated academic standards, high medical standards, competition from the private sector and shortages of certain skill sets in Canadian society.
Given that in the fiscal year 2006-07 the Canadian Forces will continue to face challenges in recruiting that may ultimately affect their capacity to meet overall recruiting and forces expansion objectives to grow the regular force by an additional 13,000 and the reserve force by 10,000, would the parliamentary secretary please describe the specific activities currently in progress or planned that would mitigate the recruiting and retention problem?