National Defence committee  Mr. May, I don't think there's a single silver bullet for this, but I do list 11 things in the brief that will eventually come to you. They're sort of at the top of my hit parade. Some of them are actually not very difficult. It would be great if a significant number of them coul

National Defence committee  I was involved in some retention studies a few years ago. I don't think we're doing too badly on retention. I think that the area of the biggest deficit is on the recruiting end. When you see my recommendations, you'll see that, while there are some recommendations on retention,

National Defence committee  There already are. I had a hand in overhauling the so-called military medical training program some years ago at a point when the Canadian Armed Forces were extremely short of physicians. They weren't getting into the medical schools. The military medical training program existed

National Defence committee  One suggestion that I put in my brief, which will eventually come out of translation, is that there remains more to be done in making sure that, when people qualify for a particular trade within the armed forces, the qualification is also the certification that's required to carr

National Defence committee  From the list, I would say there remain communities—and this was touched on a few minutes ago—where there are concerns that parents have about letting their children align with what looks like an authority structure in this society. This is true of new arrivals in Canada. This is

National Defence committee  That's not true. There are hundreds of people who are subsidized going through the regular officer training program in civilian universities. The ROTP is not just in the two military colleges. The system that you're referring to still exists.

National Defence committee  Yes, there are large numbers.

National Defence committee  I could make one small comment. Most of my interlocutors who have discussed this sort of thing with me have said that it is a bit demotivating to spend much of your adult life preparing to do things you never actually do. The foreign deployments are critical in overcoming that

National Defence committee  I absolutely agree. There's no contest there.

National Defence committee  I'm not sure how germane it would be, but I think satisfaction comes with accomplishment. Accomplishment comes from being adequately prepared to make that accomplishment. Youri already touched on the business of trying to draw in people who are mid-career and not drawing them in

National Defence committee  Actually, I hadn't talked about the differential, but certainly, during much of the time that I was involved with people being posted from one place to another, it was in place and it was highly useful. I certainly see the value in making it more prominent.

National Defence committee  The risk aversion that I was speaking of is not really related to the issue of negative publicity of the type that exists now. It's a risk aversion about embarrassment due to possible individual cases of making a mistake in judgment. That's a problem that has become, I would say,

National Defence committee  There's one other thing which could help, if I could just add, and that's parallel processing. Rather than taking a candidate, checking one thing, then putting it further down the pipeline and checking another thing, and on and on, doing all those steps at one time, rather than w

National Defence committee  Yes. When I was still vice-principal of Queen's University, I was one of the seven members of the study group under General Ramsey Withers on the future of RMC in the late nineties. At that time, we were looking at these ratios, and the research strongly supported the notion that

National Defence committee  That's a really good question. It's partly because the risk aversion comes all the way down from the political sector, where there's a risk of any embarrassment. You're also quite right that some of the risk aversion comes from some of the people in the recruiting group itself, p