BC to expand job protection for Canadian military reservists

By: David Pugliese, Defence Watch 

British Columbia’s government says it has expanded job-protected leave for Canadian military reserve forces in the province to cover leave for military training.

The leave expansion was announced Thursday by BC Premier Christy Clark at Canadian Forces Base Comox on Vancouver Island.

The change will allow reservists unpaid leave from their civilian jobs for up to 20 days-per-year for training activities, according to BC’s government. The government noted that unpaid leave for reservists is already provided for, if:

• reservists are deployed outside of Canada;
• engaged in pre- or post- deployment activities either inside or outside Canada, or
• deployed to a domestic operation dealing with an emergency.

Poorly-trained Reservists may endanger Peacekeeping Missions: Auditor-General

By: Steven Chase, Globe and Mail 

The Auditor-General of Canada says there is a risk that inadequately trained reservists may endanger soldiers’ health and safety on a deployment such as a peacekeeping mission to Africa.

The government is preparing to announce what it bills as a major return to Canadian peacekeeping and there is widespread expectation that this could include a sizable contingent of soldiers to a particular dangerous and deadly United Nations mission in the West African country of Mali. More than 105 peacekeepers have died there since 2013, including 69 from “malicious acts.”

Reservists, or part-time soldiers, serve alongside regular troops in deployments. For instance, army reserve soldiers completed 4,642 deployments to Afghanistan, where 16 of them died and 75 were wounded in action.

Auditor-General Michael Ferguson appeared before a Senate committee on Tuesday morning to follow up on a spring, 2016, report that revealed the weak state of Canada’s army reserve – with major shortfalls in training, equipment and preparedness. His report, released in April, said the military budgets for about 21,000 full-time and part-time reservists but can count on only an average of 13,944 trained and attending soldiers.

Asked about whether unfit reservists could jeopardize themselves or others in a deployment such as African peacekeeping, Mr. Ferguson said, “We identified that there is such a risk.”

The military tries to mitigate this by providing reservists extra training before deployment.

But the Auditor-General said his office has found that there can still be cases where reservists do not receive sufficient training. “It might have been physical fitness or it might have been training on individual weapons – so that can create a risk and that risk is then a risk to the safety of the individual and, in fact, could be a risk to the safety of the whole unit.”

In the course of the study, auditors asked to see the Department of National Defence system that tracks the training and readiness of soldiers. “According to the system, it was 7 per cent of them were up to date on their handling of their own personal weapons; 55 per cent of them were up to date on their physical fitness,” Mr. Ferguson told the senators.

He said that when auditors asked DND why the reservists appeared to be so unprepared, “the response we got from National Defence was, ‘The information in that system is not reliable.’ ”

He said this means that the military is relying on individual unit commanders to decide if their reservists are ready to be deployed “and they’re not really tracking in enough detail” whether these troops are prepared.

His spring report also noted significant shortfalls in equipment and instruction for reservists.

Mr. Ferguson said his office found many reserve units were not given clear instructions “on what they were supposed to be training for.”

He said the Canadian Armed Forces should establish a minimum level of skill and training for all soldiers, regardless of whether they are in the reserve or the regular force, “before they would be allowed into that sort of dangerous theatre.”

The Army Reserve has more than 120 units across Canada.

A spokesman for the Department of National Defence said no ill-equipped reservists will be sent abroad. “The bottom line is that we would never deploy members who aren’t trained, ready and equipped to meet their mission in service of Canada,” Daniel LeBouthillier said.

He said the DND is taking steps to improve the training and readiness of reservists, including doing a better job of ensuring units get the funds they need, boosting recruitment and retention strategies, fixing gaps in training and trying to provide more equipment for this part-time force.

Auditor General paints dismal picture of the Canadian Army Reserves

By: David Pugliese, Defence Watch

Auditor General Michael Ferguson appeared before the Senate’s defence committee on Tuesday. His presentation, based on an audit of the Army reserves, as well as his answers to questions from senators painted a less than encouraging picture about the situation the Army’s reserve units find themselves in. Here is some of what Ferguson had to say:

-Training of the Army reserve was not fully integrated with that of the regular Army units. Although the Army reserve was given clear guidance on preparing for domestic missions, units did not receive the same level of guidance or how to train troops soldiers for international missions. The Army Reserve doesn’t always have access to the equipment it needed for training and deployments, Ferguson noted.

– Army reserve units are responsible for training their own soldiers. But the AG found that many reserve units didn’t have the number of soldiers they needed. Twelve of the 123 Army reserve units were smaller than half of their ideal size, Ferguson said.

– The Canadian Army provided funding for 21,000 reserve soldiers but only about 14,000 were active and trained. When Army reserve units met in 2105 for their annual, large‑scale collective training events across Canada, only about 3,600 Army Reserve soldiers attended, Ferguson said.

– DND knows that the current reserve recruiting system doesn’t work and that it needs to take steps to boost retention. It has set a goal to increase the Army reserve by 950 soldiers by 2019. But Ferguson said this goal will be difficult to achieve as the number of Army reserve soldiers declined by about 1,000 soldiers a year for the three years his office conducted the audit. Ferguson pointed to the latest numbers provided by DND; as of May 15, 2016, the number of active and trained Army reserve soldiers dropped by a further 1,000 soldiers, to 13,181.

-Ferguson’s audit found that although individual skills training was designed to train the Army reserve and regular army soldiers to the same standard, reserve courses were designed to teach significantly fewer skills than were taught in regular army courses. This skill gap was not always addressed during the pre‑deployment training of Army reserve soldiers, Ferguson pointed out. One example he used was that when Canadian Army soldiers began to deploy as part of NATO’s mission in Eastern Europe, a gap remained in weapons training between Army reserve and regular force soldiers.

-A number of reserve soldiers weren’t receiving the number of days of training that was predicted for them.

-Even if the reserves had all the personnel needed and all of the equipment required, and were doing all of the training, the result would be a severe strain on the existing funds the force has.

-Twenty‑seven per cent of the Army reserve’s existing budget is being spent on full‑time reservists, even though reserves are supposed to be mostly part-time.

-$166 million out of $706 million of their total budget is being allocated back to National Defence to pay for infrastructure.

“What I’m saying is based on everything that we’ve looked at, it is hard for me to sit here and see how they would be able to fund everything they’re supposed to do within the budget that they currently have,” Ferguson told senators. “But certainly it looks to me like it would be a significant challenge for them.”

Canada’s Ragged Reserves have too few vehicles, little ammo and now...no radios

By: Christie Blatchford

Now, it’s radios that Canadian reserve units are expected to do without, probably until the summer of 2017.

The army recently took away the old radios because it’s replacing them, Postmedia sources say, but with the usual staggering incompetence, failed to synch the clawback with the acquisition of the new ones.

Ergo, no radios until July of next year.

Without radios, soldiers on training or exercise in the field won’t be able to communicate with one another, which rather defeats the ostensible goal of having part-time soldiers who are as well-trained as full-time or regular soldiers.

CBC: Thunder Bay Reservists during an Exercise in 2015

Mind you, that may matter less than it should because there are fewer and fewer such courses and exercises available to reserve soldiers anyway — even though such things are a draw and mean a paycheque for young men and women off from school for the summer.

As well, many units have fewer vehicles available to them because they’re either rusting out or unserviceable — or because mechanics can’t be trained because regulations decree that they can only trained by regular-force members and there aren’t enough of those around.

Most cruel is that the reserves are being deliberately starved and the culprit starving them is, as usual, the bureaucracy of the regular (or full-time) army itself

In other words, for Canada’s beleaguered militia — the 117 reserve units, many of them among the country’s oldest and most storied regiments, based in 130 cities and towns across the country — it is in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, deja vu all over again.

Most cruel is that the reserves are being deliberately starved and the culprit starving them is, as usual, the bureaucracy of the regular (or full-time) army itself.

But if the situation is dire, as reserve leaders say, it is also familiar.

The gutting of the militia is an old, familiar story. It always happens the same way.

First, reserve units have their quotas cut.

This last happened in 2010, when Brigadier-General John Collin, then the commander of Joint Task Force Central Area (this means Ontario) held a series of town hall meetings at which he said the army was looking to chop 5,000 reservists.

That’s pretty much what they’ve done.

As federal Auditor-General Michael Ferguson said in a spring report on the state of the army reserve, units have lost about 1,000 soldiers a year for several years, and instead of the 21,000 reservists the army purported to fund in its budget of last year, there were only 13,944.

Then, since recruiting is always laughably slow (last I looked, it took an average 180 days to enrol a soldier for a part-time job), the bodies coming in the door don’t begin to fill the holes left by those who are going out even by way of normal attrition.

Eventually, some of the regiments either run out of bullets (seriously, that happened once, years ago) or courses to send their soldiers on or leaders to run them, and someone like me writes about it, at which point, government and regular army folks who control the purse strings for the reserves deny or minimize the crisis, swear there’s nothing to see here, and move on.

And while governments have been more or less inept or uninterested, the problem is not one created by politicians; rather, by craven officials in the regular army who see any increase in militia size or power as a threat and who even get away with ignoring the will of the government of the day.

The previous Conservative government, for instance, promised to increase the reserves by 10,000, reneged on that promise, then slashed reserve pay budgets and made things worse. Then-defence minister Peter MacKay ordered his department to develop policies to stop militia paycheques being used for other purposes, but never got an answer, let alone a result.

As the military scholar Jack English wrote in a scathing report several years ago, for the military, compliance with government orders has come to be seen as a voluntary matter.

Ten years ago, the Canadian army, in the form of Task Force Orion in Kandahar — the core regiment the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, but with plenty of reservists too — was on the ground in Afghanistan.

That wonderfully nimble battle group, headed by then-Lieutenant-Colonel Ian Hope, was punching way above its weight and about to suffer some of its most significant losses.

And a century ago, on July 1, in the village of Beaumont-Hamel, France, 700 members of the First Newfoundland Regiment were being slaughtered in the first phase of the Battle of the Somme.

Yet with these two historic events on the military calendar, one modern and one from the First World War, the biggest mission on the Canadian Forces’ radar today is Op Honour, the purported “fight” against harmful and inappropriate sexual behaviour in the military.

How very sad that this army — under-led, over-managed and risk-averse as it is — may just be up for that fearsome task.

cblatchford@postmedia.com

Canadian Rangers Receiving New Uniforms

By Peter Moon

Defence Watch Guest author

The Canadian Army is issuing several items of new clothing for Canadian Rangers across the Far North of Ontario.

“The clothing they are getting is in their traditional red colour,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Matthew Richardson, commanding officer of the 3rd Canadian Ranger Patrol Group, which commands the 650 Rangers in 23 First Nation communities in northern Ontario. “People will know that they are clearly Rangers in their new uniforms because it’s all in Ranger red.”

The new uniforms are a red fleece, red raincoat, and a red winter outer jacket

The Rangers are part-time army reservists who wear a traditional red “hoodie” as part of their distinctive military uniform.

The first uniforms were delivered to the Peawanuck and Attawapiskat patrols during a visit to the two communities by Colonel Richardson. He said they will soon be delivered to other Rangers across the north. The new uniforms supplement the military kit already issued to all Rangers.

“They have the gear they wear out on the land and that gear is warmer than the new items of clothing,” Richardson said. “The purpose of the new uniforms is not so much for day to day events. It’s more something to wear at ceremonial and community events and for some training events. In addition to the new uniforms we’ve thrown in new hats, t-shirts, and hoodies for them.”

(Sergeant Peter Moon is the public affairs ranger for 3rd Canadian Ranger Patrol Group at Canadian Forces Base Borden.)

Photo above: New Ranger uniforms arrive at Peawanuck airport.

Photo below: Ranger Denise Patrick and Master Corporal Pamela Chookomoolin show of their new uniforms to Winisk First Nation Chief Edmund Hunter in Peawanuck.





Photos by Peter Moon