Canadian Army Reserve—National Defence

Opening Statement to the Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence

Canadian Army Reserve—National Defence

(Report 5—2016 Spring Reports of the Auditor General of Canada)

20 September 2016

Michael Ferguson, CPA, CA
FCA (New Brunswick)
Auditor General of Canada

Mr. Chair, thank you for this opportunity to discuss our 2016 spring report on the Canadian Army Reserve. Joining me at the table is Gordon Stock, the Principal responsible for the audit.

In our audit, we examined whether the Army Reserve was prepared to deploy on domestic and international missions. We concluded that the Army Reserve had been shrinking, and that gaps in training meant that Reserve soldiers were not fully prepared to deploy on all missions.

The Canadian Army needs the Army Reserve in order to carry out assigned missions. The Army Reserve provides almost half of the Canadian Army’s 40,000 soldiers. On major international missions, the Canadian Army expects Army Reserve units to provide up to 20 percent of the deployed soldiers.

However, we found that the training of the Army Reserve was not fully integrated with that of 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 on how to train their soldiers for international missions. We also observed that the Army Reserve did not always have access to the equipment it needed for training and deployments.

Army Reserve units are responsible for training their own soldiers. However, we found that many Army Reserve units did not have the number of soldiers they needed. For example, 12 of the 123 Army Reserve units were smaller than half of their ideal size. Although the Canadian Army provided funding for 21,000 Army Reserve soldiers, only about 14,000 were active and trained. In 2015, when Army Reserve units met for their annual large-scale collective training events across Canada, only about 3,600 Army Reserve soldiers attended.

National Defence knows that the current Reserve recruiting system does not work and that it needs to take steps to improve retention. It has set a goal to increase the Army Reserve by 950 soldiers by 2019, but in our opinion, this goal will be difficult to achieve, given that the number of Army Reserve soldiers declined by about 1,000 soldiers a year for the three years we audited. Earlier this year, National Defence confirmed that this trend has continued. As of 15 May 2016, the number of active and trained Army Reserve soldiers has declined by a further 1,000 soldiers, to 13,181.

It is critical that National Defence has information on whether soldiers are qualified for deployment. However, the system that records this information indicated that a high percentage of Army Reserve soldiers did not hold the required qualifications. National Defence told us that the information from this system could not be relied on.

The National Defence Act has established that Reserve Force members are to serve primarily on a part-time basis when not deployed. However, National Defence has, in effect, created a class of Army Reserve soldiers who are employed on a continuing full-time basis. In the 2014–15 fiscal year, the Canadian Army spent about 27 percent of its overall budget for Army Reserve pay and operating expenses on these full-time contracts, leaving less available for other Army Reserve activities.

The Canadian Army allocates funds for Army Reserve unit activities, including training. But the funding model is not consistent with expected results.  In the 2014–15 fiscal year, National Defence reallocated funds from the Army Reserve budget to uses other than those of the Army Reserve.

In our audit, we found that although individual skills training was designed to train the Army Reserve and Regular Army soldiers to the same standard for a particular individual skill, Army Reserve courses were designed to teach significantly fewer skills than were taught in Regular Army courses. We found that this skill gap was not always addressed during the pre-deployment training of Army Reserve soldiers. For example, when Canadian Army soldiers began to deploy as part of NATO’s collective defence in Eastern Europe, a gap remained in weapons training between Army Reserve and Regular Army soldiers.

We made 13 recommendations in our audit report. National Defence has responded that it will address each recommendation, and it has recently provided a detailed action plan on how it intends to address them.

Mr. Chair, this concludes my opening remarks. We would be pleased to answer any questions the Committee may have. Thank you.