Public Accounts committee  I think the audit reports do show some systemic problems in recruitment. It's a challenge. It has been a challenge and it continues to be a challenge. There are some events that took place between this audit and the last one. In particular, we went through two major deficit reduc

Public Accounts committee  There are some reasons for that. One is our capacity to recruit. Some of it, too, is that, in some of the most difficult occupations, you are competing for a very scarce resource, and I think in my remarks I talked about that—doctors, psychiatrists, and so on—and I think they can

Public Accounts committee  I think as I indicated before, to meet our deficit targets, we closed recruitment centres. That was a bad idea, because you cut off a lot of the capacity you need to bring people in. We're rebuilding that capacity, hiring more staff, as the general has mentioned. I think that's

Public Accounts committee  Yes, we have the resources necessary, and we now have new leadership to this file. We have a good game plan to do that, with a lot of work ahead of us. However, I don't believe it's a question of resources. We have technology. We have resources. We have tools. We have to get on

Public Accounts committee  Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I just want to add one point. In some of the occupations where we're struggling to recruit, there's a lot of that in Canada. If you live in rural ridings, you know how hard it is to get doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, dental technicians. Our forces f

Public Accounts committee  I don't mean to imply that the problems we have in recruiting are solely due to the cuts that were made. As the Auditor General's report shows, it has always been a challenging area. The selection of recruiting offices that we offered up to cut during deficit reduction, I think,

Public Accounts committee  That would be my error. If I conveyed that, that was not my intent.

Public Accounts committee  Yes, we are doing that. The minister has driven us very hard to do that. He's been one of the strong advocates for our need to get very focused and targeted in our recruitment if we're going to be successful. In those communities we have to find leaders and spokespersons and cham

Public Accounts committee  Yes.

Public Accounts committee  I have a short response, just to clarify my remarks. I don't have a problem with government saying that we need to balance a budget and that all government departments need to tighten their belts. I wasn't in defence at the time we made the choices of what to cut. I am just com

Public Accounts committee  My challenge right now is to go.... I need to restore some of the capacity in the recruiting group to meet the recruiting levels we need to get in order to rebuild the force to hit the 68,000 on the regulars and the 28,500 on the reserves.

Public Accounts committee  My job, being in charge of the resources, is to find the resources to allow them to do that.

Public Accounts committee  I totally agree with you. We made a decision to close some offices. That's going to save us some money on bricks and mortar. As you've rightly pointed out, we're not about to reopen those offices. If we thought that was a wrong decision, we would be reopening those offices. What

Public Accounts committee  For last fiscal year, I'll ask my colleagues what the growth was.

National Defence committee  Sure. There is $62 billion in new money over and above planned increases, which include the 3% the minister referred to. Even starting this year, there's $600 million coming on top of what was already planned in the defence budget. In the first five years, there's $6 billion in n