[English]

Today we are conducting a hearing on report 5, “Canadian Armed Forces Recruitment and Retention—National Defence”, from the fall 2016 reports of the Auditor General of Canada. Appearing as witnesses today we have Mr. Michael Ferguson, the Auditor General of Canada, and Mr. Gordon Stock, principal. Welcome. Also, from the Department of National Defence, we have Mr. John Forster, the deputy minister. As well, he has brought other personnel to assist him.

I'll remind the committee again that we are televised, so if those in the audience and the committee members wouldn't mind muting their BlackBerrys or telephone communication items, that would be greatly appreciated.

I would simply ask you, Mr. Chair, if you could look into what happened and get back to us at the next meeting.

I would like to mention a leak to the media. The CBC/Radio-Canada did a story about the auditor general's spring report.

[English]

All right. First of all, to the committee, I appreciate the fact that this was brought forward by our committee members to me, and it was checked out. Typically, when the Auditor General reports, he reports on May 16. We know that this is coming. Those reports are tabled in the House of Commons the very same day, but on occasion the Auditor General's office does special reports. The special report is somewhat different in its tabling process. That is, the special report is made public on the website and tabled at a later date. My understanding is that the report that was quoted from was indeed one of these special reports. The report had already been on the website.

We still table the special examinations with the House of Commons to make sure that you are aware of them. Those special examinations are different from our performance audits, because the mandate is under the Financial Administration Act and our requirement is to report them to the board of directors. But we still table them to make sure that you are aware of them and that you can hold hearings on them.

The special examination was delivered to Defence Construction Canada in January, so they had a certain amount of time to make it public—actually, it was made public in January, so we would have delivered it to them before that.

Under the Financial Administration Act, we do special examinations of crown corporations, and we have to do a special examination of each crown corporation once every 10 years. The special examinations that we do are reports under the Financial Administration Act, and we are required to report to the board of directors of the crown corporation. Our process with those is not tabling them in the House of Commons. Our process is to provide those to the board of the crown corporation. The board then has a certain period of time to make it public. I've forgotten how long it is—30 days or 60 days, something like that.

There is just one more point, and then I'll go to your presentation.

My question would be—and you don't have to answer it right now—are there any recommended changes that you would make to that process? In other words, do you see a deficiency in that process as opposed to what we normally do with your report? I have to tell you, they don't come to us in that same fashion because they're public first, so they're very different. I wonder if you think there's any need for us to look at trying to align them up a little more so that we don't have this uniqueness, or is that uniqueness justified and this is just fine the way it is, in your opinion?

You did mention towards the end, Mr. Ferguson, that it could be subject to a public hearing by us. You're very familiar now with our procedures, our routines, and how we conduct and go about choosing chapters, etc. It's very different, of course, because of the procedure that unfolds when you table your full report.

I think the reason that it came to our attention the way it did is that the process has been in place for some time, but normally there is the media on it. The fact that there was certainly media before we saw it caught us all off guard.

In terms of your question about should it change or not, I mean again, right now, it's a report that's done for the board and presented to the board. The idea of the board having to make it public within a certain period of time is so that it doesn't take a year to make it public. I don't have any particular complaints about that. I think it's more whether, as parliamentarians, you're satisfied with that process.

What we did in the past was, we would just do a small chapter that said, by the way, over the past year we had issued special examinations on the following crown corporations, and give you just the summary of it, whereas over the last probably year or year and a half, we've started providing you with the full special examination, so they look like full chapters.

We used to just provide a summary of the special examinations. Recently, we've gone to providing you with the full special examination to make sure that you're aware of all of the issues. I think the fact that recently we've started giving you that special examination as the complete report, and it looks like all of our other performance audits, is probably a little bit what's causing some of the confusion because this practice has been going on ever since special examinations were put into the Financial Administration Act, the practice of us preparing them, reporting them to the board of the crown corporation, and the board making them public.

The other thing that I should mention to you is that on May 16 we will be including three special examinations. For one of them, again the time period is such that the crown corporation will probably make it public just shortly before May 16, so there may be another one that you will hear about before the actual tabling on May 16.

The idea of the special examinations is that, in those cases, we are going in, we're looking at the systems and practices of that crown corporation, and we're reporting to the board of that crown corporation whether there are any significant deficiencies in their systems and practices. The special examinations around crown corporations were designed as reporting to the board about their systems and practices, but putting a requirement on the board for them to make the report public.

I guess it's how the process is defined under the legislation. It's really up to Parliament to decide if Parliament would rather have that done in a different way.

First of all, I will welcome Mr. Ferguson's comments in regard to the question that we look at today on recruitment and retention.

We will now go into our issue of the day, if you want to call it that.

[Translation]

We made seven recommendations in our audit report. National Defence has said that it agrees with each of the recommendations and is in the process of addressing some of them.

In our 2002 and 2006 audits, we found similar problems. These included setting recruiting targets lower than the needs and having no comprehensive plan to attract more applicants, especially for chronically understaffed occupations. We believe that without significant changes to recruiting, the Canadian Armed Forces will not have the members it needs in the future.

Retaining qualified and effective personnel reduces the demand for, and costs of, recruiting and training new members. In the 2015-16 fiscal year, almost one quarter of occupations had attrition rates higher than 10 per cent. National Defence had developed a retention strategy in 2009, but never fully implemented it. At the time of our audit, the Canadian Armed Forces planned to develop a revised retention strategy by June 2018.

In a number of instances, we found that the Canadian Armed Forces' recruiting process did not fit the needs of applicants and caused delays. Examples included delays for medical screening and delays for assessing whether applicants' previous education could reduce their training requirements. In some cases, National Defence closed files and lost qualified candidates who were still interested in enrolling.

We also found that the Canadian Armed Forces had set 25% as their target for women in their ranks but that their recruiting efforts maintained the representation of women at only 14%. Furthermore, about half of the women in the regular force were concentrated in six occupations.

Although the regular force had determined the number of recruits it needed, its recruiting plans and targets were reduced to fit National Defence's capacity to process applications and train new members. National Defence met its overall reduced recruiting target in 2016; however, it accomplished this by exceeding enrolment targets for some occupations while leaving other occupations short-handed.

In our audit, we examined how National Defence had recruited, trained, and retained the regular force members it needed. Overall, we found that the regular forces had about 4,200 fewer fully trained members than they needed.

Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss our 2016 fall report on Canadian Armed Forces recruitment and retention. Joining me today is Gordon Stock, the principal responsible for the audit.

: Thank you, Mr. Chair, for having me back to speak to you and the members of the committee on the Auditor General's report number 5, pertaining to National Defence. Thank you, Mr. Chair, for having me back to speak to you and the members of the committee on the Auditor General's report number 5, pertaining to National Defence.

[Translation]

You will notice some new faces today.

I would like to introduce Lieutenant-General Lamarre, who has just assumed his duties as commander, military personnel command; Brigadier-General Steven Whelan, commander, military personnel generation; Colonel André Demers, commander, Canadian Forces recruiting group; and Susan Truscott, director general, military personnel and research analysis.

Lieutenant-General Lamarre is heading up the team that will be responsible for implementing all the recommendations in the report because we, the defence team, have taken them to heart.

We appreciate the auditor general's work in identifying the weaknesses in the Canadian Armed Forces' approach to recruitment and retention. We are committed to addressing his concerns.

[English]

Last week, we tabled with you our management action plan that addresses each of the recommendations. We are conducting an extensive review of our entire recruitment process to make it more timely and efficient, but we're not waiting for the review to be complete before we move forward. We've already used the Auditor General's recommendations to refocus our efforts and to improve the way we attract, select, and enrol new recruits and retain military personnel.

I can tell you personally that the management and care of our people in the armed forces is among the highest priorities of the minister, the chief of the defence staff, and myself. Key among these goals is increasing the representation of women to 25% of all Canadian Armed Forces members by 2026, at 1% per year.

Canada is a leader among NATO countries with respect to the number of women in our ranks and one of the first to allow women to serve in all occupations, but we need and want to do more. We're at 15.2% female representation now, not quite as low as the 14% quoted in the media in February but not as high as we need. Encouragingly, the number of women who enrolled in the military was up 38% this past fiscal year, and the number of women in the Canadian Armed Forces increased by 0.3%, a small change but the first positive growth in more than a decade.

We've convened three working groups that will propose, over the summer, a way to increase these numbers: first, with a strategic intake plan that sets realistic targets; second, with branding, marketing, and targeted advertising strategies; and third, with ways to address barriers to recruitment. In the meantime, to help close the gap between 15% and 25%, we're fast-tracking the applications of qualified women to our military colleges, expediting the intake process for women who meet the entry standards, and reaching out to women who started but did not complete the application process. We want to encourage them to reconsider joining.

Of the 1,046 female applicants we've been able to contact so far, we've reopened files for 457 of them, and 96 are being processed for enrolment. That's about 9%. It's a good start, but we need to encourage more women to apply in the first place.

In February and March, we ran advertising campaigns on Facebook and Linked In tailored to women in the military. The campaign highlighted the wide variety of interesting and exciting jobs in the armed forces and in civilian roles. It spoke to personal fulfillment, to the opportunity to help others, and to the ability to achieve work-life balance, acquire transferable skills, and receive paid education and training for salary.

More campaigns are planned for this fiscal year to attract women and men of all backgrounds.

Our goal continues to be to have indigenous peoples make up 3.5% of the armed forces, and for visible minorities to make up 11.8%. We've doubled the number of visible minorities in the forces over the last 10 years, and we want to double it again. As the and the chief of the defence staff have said, diversity is our strength.

We simply cannot afford not to engage quality candidates. However, we do compete with employers across the country in specialized occupations such as doctors, engineers, social workers, and others in high demand. The recruitment of mental health professionals is especially difficult due to the short supply of psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health care nurses, and case workers. The challenge is made greater by the demands associated with a military career. It's an exacting and sometimes hazardous profession. Realities such as deployment, separation from family, relocation, and the general rigours of military life do not appeal to everyone.

We're not going to shy away from our task. We know we'll need to dedicate more financial and human resources to recruiting and training the required number of personnel for each occupation. We're putting in place measures to improve our five-year recruitment planning and to ensure that adjustments can be made as needed to recruiting requirements for specific occupations. We're going to continue to launch advertising and marketing campaigns that raise awareness of the more than 100 different jobs and career choices in the armed forces.

Attracting people's attention, sparking their interest, and finalizing their enrolment are three distinct tasks. We continue to improve and better target our advertising and marketing to get better at enrolment too.

The Auditor General's report attributes a notable loss of applicants to lengthy delays in the recruiting, and we agree. In December 2016, we launched a 10-month pilot to streamline the intake and speed up the enrolment of applicants into the reserve force, as well as for the Royal Canadian Navy, the Canadian Army, and the Royal Canadian Air Force. Our goal for the regular force is to enrol most of the new applicants within 60 to 90 days. For those who have complicated security or medical review demands, our goal is within 180 days.

Once in, we need to have these recruits begin their basic training almost immediately. We've hired 26 military instructors to ensure that they reach their operational functional point as soon as possible. We're implementing a new system to decrease wait times for military training by occupation. To retain these new members, we're creating a work environment that enables as much ease of movement as possible within the institution.

For the primary reserves, we aim to process people within a matter of days, not months, so that we can meet our target of 28,500 primary reservists by the end of the 2018-19. We're emphasizing to Canadians that the reserves are a meaningful way to serve their country, even as they go to school or work in another job. There's no commitment to move, no obligation to deploy, and no long-term contract, just a flexible schedule and the chance to train and serve close to home.

A career in the Canadian Armed Forces has its challenges, but as I am sure Lieutenant-General Lamarre will attest, it's also one of the most rewarding work and life experiences available.

In the two years I've had the privilege of being deputy minister of National Defence, I've had the honour of working with many women and men in the armed forces. Whether corporals, generals, members of the regular force or the reserves, the soldiers, sailors, and aviators I've met are proud of the work they do and the uniform they wear. Following the guidance of the Auditor General, we need to get that message out.

Last year, the armed forces grew for the first time in five years. This year's results look even more promising. I'm proud to help lead a defence team that is committed to being more inclusive, more diverse, and more qualified than ever. I am confident that under leadership of the chief of defence staff, General Vance, and Lieutenant-General Lamarre, we will build the strength and diversity of the forces even further.