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.
Showing posts with label Reserve Problems. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reserve Problems. Show all posts
Friday, September 23, 2016
Thursday, September 22, 2016
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.”
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.”
Tuesday, June 28, 2016
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.
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
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 |
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
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
Canadian Army Reserve Responds to AG Report
DND Press Release
Ottawa – National Defence / Canadian Army
Lieutenant-General Marquis Hainse, Commander of the Canadian Army, issued the following statement today regarding the 2016 Auditor General Spring Report:
“On behalf of the Canadian Army, I thank the Auditor General for his advice and recommendations in his report on the Canadian Army Reserve. I accept this report and will address its recommendations.
“The Canadian Army Reserve is an integrated part of the Canadian Army that contributes to the success of operations at home and abroad. This has been proven across the world most notably in Afghanistan over the last decade and here in Canada as recently as last summer with the forest fires in Saskatchewan. Equally important, the Army Reserve provides a footprint in over one hundred Canadian communities across Canada. Over the next year, the Canadian Armed Forces will consider the personnel pressures that are affecting attrition and retention and develop a plan to keep the Army Reserve strong and healthy. We are now in the process of implementing strategies to reduce a number of challenges identified in the recruiting process to make sure we have the right people for the future.
“Training is fundamental to operational excellence and I appreciate that the Auditor General has recommended areas where we can further improve. We are putting measures in place to continue to ensure that each reservist is prepared for any mission, domestic or international. Any gaps in training will be assessed and resolved before deployment and the completion of Army Reserve training objectives will be confirmed annually. We are also currently developing a plan to address the accessibility of equipment available for Reserve training as identified in the report.
“The Canadian Army takes the stewardship of public resources seriously and continuously works to improve its funding model. The Canadian Army is currently revising the Army Reserve funding model as part of its planned cyclical review process. The recommendations of the Auditor General will serve to inform this review and ensure the funding model is more transparent and accountable to the Government of Canada. The Canadian Army will work to ensure that funding is allocated in an efficient, responsive and timely fashion.
“Finally, I would like to emphasize that the Canadian Army always strives for excellence and we will continue to work at finding solutions to ensure that our soldiers are well trained, well lead and well equipped.”
Ottawa – National Defence / Canadian Army
Lieutenant-General Marquis Hainse, Commander of the Canadian Army, issued the following statement today regarding the 2016 Auditor General Spring Report:
“On behalf of the Canadian Army, I thank the Auditor General for his advice and recommendations in his report on the Canadian Army Reserve. I accept this report and will address its recommendations.
“The Canadian Army Reserve is an integrated part of the Canadian Army that contributes to the success of operations at home and abroad. This has been proven across the world most notably in Afghanistan over the last decade and here in Canada as recently as last summer with the forest fires in Saskatchewan. Equally important, the Army Reserve provides a footprint in over one hundred Canadian communities across Canada. Over the next year, the Canadian Armed Forces will consider the personnel pressures that are affecting attrition and retention and develop a plan to keep the Army Reserve strong and healthy. We are now in the process of implementing strategies to reduce a number of challenges identified in the recruiting process to make sure we have the right people for the future.
“Training is fundamental to operational excellence and I appreciate that the Auditor General has recommended areas where we can further improve. We are putting measures in place to continue to ensure that each reservist is prepared for any mission, domestic or international. Any gaps in training will be assessed and resolved before deployment and the completion of Army Reserve training objectives will be confirmed annually. We are also currently developing a plan to address the accessibility of equipment available for Reserve training as identified in the report.
“The Canadian Army takes the stewardship of public resources seriously and continuously works to improve its funding model. The Canadian Army is currently revising the Army Reserve funding model as part of its planned cyclical review process. The recommendations of the Auditor General will serve to inform this review and ensure the funding model is more transparent and accountable to the Government of Canada. The Canadian Army will work to ensure that funding is allocated in an efficient, responsive and timely fashion.
“Finally, I would like to emphasize that the Canadian Army always strives for excellence and we will continue to work at finding solutions to ensure that our soldiers are well trained, well lead and well equipped.”
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Auditor General Highlights Issues with Reserve Force
By David Pugliese, The Ottawa Citizen
Auditor General Michael Ferguson released a number of reports this morning. A couple of his findings deal with the Canadian Forces. Here are mini summaries of those reports as outlined by theCanadian Press news service (more details to follow as they come):
“Individual units of the Canadian Army’s reserve units lack sufficient soldiers — just 14,000 instead of a needed 21,000 — as well as access to key equipment for domestic missions and clear guidance on training, counter to National Defence’s stated goal.
Between the 2012–13 and 2014–15 fiscal years, the number of Canadian Army reservists has dwindled by about five per cent, or about 1,000 soldiers per year.”
More from Canadian Press:
Michael Ferguson’s latest audit conducted a detailed examination of the problems faced by the military’s part-time branch and found that even though there are 21,000 positions on the books, only 13,944 reservists are considered active and ready for service.
The federal government’s stated goal is to have a reserve force of 27,000.
The audit goes into detail about how National Defence has not only failed to recruit for the part-time force, but reservists are quitting at a rate faster than they can be replaced and doing so before they are fully trained.
“In late 2015, National Defence set a goal to increase the Army Reserve by 950 soldiers (five per cent) by 2019. In our opinion, this goal will be difficult to achieve given the present rate of attrition,” said the auditor’s report.
The sweeping review also looked at training and found that many reservists don’t receive certain basic weapons training, such as the use of a pistol or grenade launcher.
They have been woefully unprepared for some duties in combat zones, such as convoy escort and force protection, and ill-equipped for missions at home like responding to forest fires and floods.
When there is a domestic emergency, reserve units are expected to assemble trained units of up to 600 soldiers, but Ferguson’s report noted that they were thrown into the field over the last few years — specifically in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba — without everything they needed, including essential items.
“When we reviewed these reports, we found many instances of key equipment lacking, such as reconnaissance vehicles, command posts, and communications equipment,” the audit said.
“We found that the Canadian Army has not defined the list of equipment that all army reserve units should have for training their soldiers and teams for domestic missions. This means that army reserve units may have to rely on other Canadian Armed Forces units to provide this equipment, but we were told that it is often not available.”
The former Harper government was keen on highlighting the participation of reservists, notably the Canadian Rangers, in annual Arctic exercises. In 2013, it staged a series of photo-ops with then-prime minister Stephen Harper shooting rifles and mingling with the troops, who are drawn from indigenous northern communities.
The audit says the army made a special effort to equip them, but even there Ferguson’s report found support wanting.
“Following recent training exercises, these groups reported that they did not always have access to the equipment they needed to be self-sufficient, such as reliable communications and vehicles larger than light snowmobiles,” said the report.
National Defence, in its response, agreed with the criticism and said it is working on the equipment issue.
Ferguson also tore a strip off the government over how it balances and pays for reservists, some of who are being called up to full-time duty. Under the law, a part-time soldier can be converted to full-time status for periods of between 180 days and three years.
But those jobs can be —and often are — renewed for longer periods of time. It was one of the criticisms in retired lieutenant-general Andrew Leslie’s 2011 report, which was meant to overhaul administration at National Defence.
Ferguson’s report goes a step further showing that as many as 1,704 part-time soldiers are on full-time duty, but the money to pay for them is being taken from the reserve budget.
“This means that the Canadian Army spent about 27 per cent of its overall army reserve pay and operating expenses on these full-time contracts, leaving less available for other army reserve activities,” said the report.
Auditor General Michael Ferguson released a number of reports this morning. A couple of his findings deal with the Canadian Forces. Here are mini summaries of those reports as outlined by theCanadian Press news service (more details to follow as they come):
“Individual units of the Canadian Army’s reserve units lack sufficient soldiers — just 14,000 instead of a needed 21,000 — as well as access to key equipment for domestic missions and clear guidance on training, counter to National Defence’s stated goal.
Between the 2012–13 and 2014–15 fiscal years, the number of Canadian Army reservists has dwindled by about five per cent, or about 1,000 soldiers per year.”
More from Canadian Press:
Michael Ferguson’s latest audit conducted a detailed examination of the problems faced by the military’s part-time branch and found that even though there are 21,000 positions on the books, only 13,944 reservists are considered active and ready for service.
The federal government’s stated goal is to have a reserve force of 27,000.
The audit goes into detail about how National Defence has not only failed to recruit for the part-time force, but reservists are quitting at a rate faster than they can be replaced and doing so before they are fully trained.
“In late 2015, National Defence set a goal to increase the Army Reserve by 950 soldiers (five per cent) by 2019. In our opinion, this goal will be difficult to achieve given the present rate of attrition,” said the auditor’s report.
The sweeping review also looked at training and found that many reservists don’t receive certain basic weapons training, such as the use of a pistol or grenade launcher.
They have been woefully unprepared for some duties in combat zones, such as convoy escort and force protection, and ill-equipped for missions at home like responding to forest fires and floods.
When there is a domestic emergency, reserve units are expected to assemble trained units of up to 600 soldiers, but Ferguson’s report noted that they were thrown into the field over the last few years — specifically in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba — without everything they needed, including essential items.
“When we reviewed these reports, we found many instances of key equipment lacking, such as reconnaissance vehicles, command posts, and communications equipment,” the audit said.
“We found that the Canadian Army has not defined the list of equipment that all army reserve units should have for training their soldiers and teams for domestic missions. This means that army reserve units may have to rely on other Canadian Armed Forces units to provide this equipment, but we were told that it is often not available.”
The former Harper government was keen on highlighting the participation of reservists, notably the Canadian Rangers, in annual Arctic exercises. In 2013, it staged a series of photo-ops with then-prime minister Stephen Harper shooting rifles and mingling with the troops, who are drawn from indigenous northern communities.
The audit says the army made a special effort to equip them, but even there Ferguson’s report found support wanting.
“Following recent training exercises, these groups reported that they did not always have access to the equipment they needed to be self-sufficient, such as reliable communications and vehicles larger than light snowmobiles,” said the report.
National Defence, in its response, agreed with the criticism and said it is working on the equipment issue.
Ferguson also tore a strip off the government over how it balances and pays for reservists, some of who are being called up to full-time duty. Under the law, a part-time soldier can be converted to full-time status for periods of between 180 days and three years.
But those jobs can be —and often are — renewed for longer periods of time. It was one of the criticisms in retired lieutenant-general Andrew Leslie’s 2011 report, which was meant to overhaul administration at National Defence.
Ferguson’s report goes a step further showing that as many as 1,704 part-time soldiers are on full-time duty, but the money to pay for them is being taken from the reserve budget.
“This means that the Canadian Army spent about 27 per cent of its overall army reserve pay and operating expenses on these full-time contracts, leaving less available for other army reserve activities,” said the report.
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