National Defence committee  Thank you very much. Mr. Chair, I am honoured to appear before this committee to speak about my new role as deputy minister of national defence. In April, I addressed this committee when I was appointed as the senior associate deputy minister. I spent the better part of my tim

National Defence committee  Thank you for those questions. In the seven months that I was the senior associate deputy minister, we had launched a number of activities for supporting the conversation about mental health. I have held question-and-answer town halls on mental health at CFB Halifax and CFB Es

National Defence committee  I'm very happy to talk about my role in terms of SSE. I see myself as a partner to the chief of the defence staff in driving implementation. We have changed the entire governance of the department in order to manage implementation so that every level in the organization that has

National Defence committee  Well, the “Strong, Secure, Engaged” initiative is workable now, but it's a 20-year program from start to finish between day one and the end of the last procurements. The strengths are it is broad, inclusive, and reflective of broad consultation with parliamentarians, the public s

National Defence committee  Mr. Venner certainly can give you quite a bit of detail on what we based it on, but my understanding is the United Kingdom and Australia put out very similar plans just before we did.

National Defence committee  Thank you. It's a really interesting question and it's a topic that we have on the table constantly. It's never off the table, in fact. Bill has been with us a week, and he's probably been in three meetings already where we've talked about how we're going to attract people. We c

National Defence committee  We do for the civilian side. We're compressing recruitment time on the military side.

National Defence committee  I can start, and then I'll ask Bill to continue, as he'll be taking on the responsibility for this file. The CDS has been direct and very clear that there is a difference between employability and deployability. We need to look very carefully at universality of service and how w

National Defence committee  I'm not aware of the work on that specific issue, so I would have to get back to you.

National Defence committee  If I could add something about the sexual misconduct reporting centre, it's now running 24-7 and is responding to calls from military serving members, civilian members on bases, victims, and people who have been accused. It's fulfilling a huge gap, obviously, in information and a

National Defence committee  It's something we're very happy to speak about, and I'll ask Mr. Venner to jump in. He's going to be responsible for this area. As part of the defence policy, we have a program that we're hoping to launch shortly, called IDEaS. It's about innovation in science and tech. Perha

National Defence committee  —and then we also have the defence engagement program that Mr. Venner can talk to.

National Defence committee  We're using analytics, the analytic system I spoke about, to measure achievement in terms of the successful implementation of each initiative. Everything is important, but some things, though, are further down the road. We're aligning implementation with the money coming in, and

National Defence committee  Thank you.

National Defence committee  I'm going to have to disagree a little bit with the premise. I don't see it as a shell game at all.