National Defence committee  Thank you. My apologies for the disruption before. I thank you for this opportunity to testify once again before the committee. I will answer your questions in both official languages, but I will testify in English. It's an interesting day to be testifying on readiness, given

National Defence committee  We have a shortfall of 7,500 members in the organization. That's over 10% of the CAF's authorized troop strength. There are simply not enough resources to attract talent. The case in point is the CAF's cyber capability. The CAF is competing against 200,000 unfilled cyber position

National Defence committee  The military tends to hire people who are what's known as “left of good” and it trains them up. That's why the military has a very robust education, training and socialization mechanism. It's because of the uniqueness of what it does and because its soldiers aren't born; they're

National Defence committee  In my view, it is inevitable in any institution that some individuals will express unacceptable views. This inevitably poses a considerable challenge for people in uniform, who must remain neutral. I would say that the Canadian Armed Forces have done a good job in identifying a

National Defence committee  The psychological screening process is important, but I think we need to look at the impact of deployment on people. We need better research and data on the resilience of people when we send them on deployment, because we see the damage done to many people by their own deployment

National Defence committee  Ms. Mathyssen, we have two significant deficits here that we can identify. One is that this country does not have a systematic network of institutes that do political education. In Germany, for instance, each of the political parties has a taxpayer-funded foundation. Those foun

National Defence committee  Ms. O'Connell, you hit the nail on the head here. We need a different recruiting model. I'll give you some examples. We need more capacity for direct entry. One of the ways Germany fills, for instance, some of its cyber-trades is by creating a direct entry program for people

National Defence committee  I might just correct you, Mrs. Gallant. It's $1 million and seven years for an officer, roughly, depending on the trade. It's much more expensive if you're a fighter pilot, for instance. What happens if you have people who are unvaccinated is shown by the aircraft carriers in bo

National Defence committee  Mrs. Gallant, it's a fantastic question that we already wrote about 20 years ago, when we went to Afghanistan. Under the Employment Equity Act, federal institutions have a mandate to proactively hire persons with disabilities. This has always been interpreted as hiring from the

National Defence committee  There's a process and a substance question. In terms of the process, I'm quite enamoured by what the U.K. did with the integrated review of foreign policy, defence, security and international development, which we treat as silos. There's an understanding that all of these are in

National Defence committee  If I may, Ms. Normandin, I will answer in English, because the answer is a bit complicated. The Canadian Armed Forces now has an NCM military cyber-operations trade. We need the same thing on the civilian side. We need a classification we don't currently have, because it's easie

National Defence committee  That assumes that we have a disproportionate attrition problem among equity-seeking groups. It turns out that was the case in the 1990s, but in the 2000s the Canadian Armed Forces remedied that attrition problem. The latest number I'm familiar with—and you can ask for those numb

National Defence committee  Mr. Robinson will have something to say here too, so I will try to keep it brief. I think the three domains that are going to be the most important and the most contentious, and in which there's the most competition and the most transformation, are maritime, space and aerospace,

National Defence committee  We live in a globalized world where, ultimately, this is a space we cannot play defence; we have to play offence. We have to know what the adversary is up to, what its capabilities are and what its intent is before it is ever able to go after us. The biggest challenge that we hav

National Defence committee  I'll make three quick points. One is that the CAF has done a pretty good job on families, on, for instance, parental leave and the way members are evaluated when they return from parental leave. There's been considerable progress made. There's still a lot of change that needs to