Mr. Chair, the minister touched briefly on the issue of recruiting in the armed forces and the plan by the new Conservative government to increase the regular force by 13,000 and reserves by 10,000.
The Standing Committee on Public Accounts recently heard positive feedback from the Auditor General on efforts by the CF in recent years to improve recruitment and retention levels. By 2005, Canadian Forces had stopped the decline in the number of trained and effective members and was actually showing a small increase.
At that time, the department was working toward a national recruiting strategy to bring more focus and cohesion to its recruiting efforts and was working on performance measures for 2007 to help it assess the success of its recruiting efforts. As well, National Defence has taken action to improve its military human resources management and is examining ways of improving its human resources information.
That was a long preamble, I understand, but could the minister elaborate on the specific efforts by the Canadian Forces over the last few years to improve recruitment rates and highlight what progress has been made to date?