Public Accounts committee  You're absolutely right on many of your assertions, and I want to talk about that in terms of the overall numbers. We are realizing that we're far behind and that 4,000 short is a big target for us to make up. I need to be open about it. As far as doing the intersection, making

Public Accounts committee  I apologize, I was just reaching across to find out if we had the exact numbers of where we are right now. I don't have that exact number, unfortunately. That was a failing on my part. I should have had it handy. I will undertake to come back specifically with an accurate number

Public Accounts committee  I can give you the actual numbers of what we have right now. For women it's 15%, for the indigenous population it's 2.5%, and for visible minorities it's 6.3%. Those are the numbers of what we're tracking.

Public Accounts committee  No, sir, you don't need to be bilingual. We want you to be able to operate in one of the two official languages and of course we provide training in the other official language as well. We do that based on where you are in your career path, but also, for example, a young francop

Public Accounts committee  We have not seen uncertainty, but you're right that different planes require different qualifications. We see that some of our pilots who travel through their careers will fly different types of platforms. At that time we have to provide training for that specifically. As far as

Public Accounts committee  I just want to make a clarification. We are not reopening the 12 recruiting centres that were shut. What we're looking at with the injection of personnel is to make sure that the capacity that was lost, along with the personnel who were manning it, is there to help facilitate the

Public Accounts committee  That's right. Twelve were reduced in 2012-13. That resulted in some loss of personnel who had been manning them. What we're doing right now is re-equipping the recruiting group with those personnel to be able to process files. There has also been a shift in how files are processe

Public Accounts committee  There is that opportunity. If somebody wants to join us right now, there is a bonus for them to join us a general duty medical officer. After that, what we tend to do with these individuals is to give them a specialty in family medicine, which is a good base to prepare them to se

Public Accounts committee  Okay.

Public Accounts committee  First of all, thanks for your observations about the financial counselling and the financial education. It is something we recognize. As part of our support program, there was an earlier question about how we supported the SISIP program, and the benefits that come from that inclu

Public Accounts committee  Without having the exact numbers in front of me, I can tell you this. Being involved in an operation tends to draw recruiting and helps it along. Young men and women are interested by what is going on. For a lot of them, it strikes at that sense of not only adventure but a desire

Public Accounts committee  Sorry, if I can add a bit to that, we reached a point where we had to increase the recruiting that we did, to be able to sustain the number of deployments that we had. During the period from 2006 to 2008, or thereabouts, we increased our yearly intake to make sure we had sufficie

Public Accounts committee  No, what I'm saying to you is that any time there's a major conflict, you tend to have recruiting centres that are popular. We just recently celebrated the 100th anniversary of Vimy. I can tell you that sounded the clarion call and people responded. The same thing occurred in th

Public Accounts committee  No. We need to be clear about that. The need for the number of recruits we have is not based on the conflicts in which we are involved. Right now we're involved in 19 different missions around the world. We are filling those mandates and those tasks given to us based on what th

Public Accounts committee  It depends on how much responsibility. It's the definition that—