National Defence committee  Sometimes it's easy to think that we're sitting here with a list of complaints like “I hated my career” and “I didn't have a good time”, but for everything negative I have to say, I also have a lot of good things. I had some of the best experiences in my life. I met some of the best people in my life there.

National Defence committee  I would say that there are a lot of genuine people within the military and supporting the military who do genuinely want to see improvement and who do genuinely work hard to make those improvements happen. They're small and incremental sometimes, but they do exist.

National Defence committee  I mean, on one extent, there are problems with the availability of contractors. There are so many contractors who get blacklisted because of the piss-poor performance—pardon my language—they do during the course of their contract, but because there's no one willing to take up our tender for the next contract, that blacklisted company gets hired to do the same terrible job all over again.

National Defence committee  Unfortunately, I'd probably have a harder time telling you the number of people who didn't end up spending their own money or using their own equipment or just for the office stuff for the armouries....

National Defence committee  When I speak, I'm not saying it's limited to the housing units. I'm talking about every building that was built prior to the 1980s.

National Defence committee  That's my understanding. However, I can only speak to the bases that I've been training on.

National Defence committee  The warnings are often just verbal. It's not like there are always signs posted. The Brampton Armoury suffered lead paint for, I think, six years before we had a remediation. There's still asbestos in the building, but we were told as long as we don't disturb the floor tiles—which is where the asbestos is contained—it'll be fine.

National Defence committee  "Average” is a pretty subjective word. I would say that it is pretty typical for some rundown urban centre houses, but not very typical for suburban houses, which are typically better maintained. It's a flawed comparison, I think.

National Defence committee  I would struggle to say that it's all the same because it's going to be wildly different from base to base.

National Defence committee  There's paint peeling, lead paint identification, asbestos identification that takes years to remediate, broken faucets, broken utilities, you name it.

National Defence committee  It's typical.

National Defence committee  I can offer a hypothesis. When I was still in the military, I was part of a lot of these surveys. I put my hand up for everything that came down. Some of them are done by paper and some of them are done by town halls. When you're in the town hall variant, you can see this happen in real time: The facilitators will reject, out of hand, certain comments that don't fit the scope of the study.

National Defence committee  Could you rephrase that question, please? I'm just trying to put it into words.

National Defence committee  To say that they can freely express themselves...no. We're pretty regulated in that fashion. There are policies that are supposed to ensure that career managers and leadership have open door policies so they can have these kinds of discussions at the lowest level, but that's entirely subject to the personalities who are in those leadership positions, because, unfortunately, not every person who gets into a leadership position is fit to be a leader.

National Defence committee  It's my understanding that these decisions are usually made person by person by the career managers. I'm not too sure whether it's a broad policy solution or more of a personnel management solution. I would also say that, to your last question, when Shannon brought up the special needs, I was reminded of a point that I wanted to make about the families who get separated because of their family needs.