POLITICS
Marquis Hainse’s battle of the budget
Q Where does the army sit with regards to resources and finances?
A Clearly this is a different time. But this is not necessarily a time that will only have challenges. It’s also a time of opportunity. What I am certainly at ease to say, from the bottom of my heart, is that the government has been generous in the past to bring us to where we are now. We are contributing to that austerity right now. We’re not in an operational tempo that we were three years ago. We just have to learn to do things differently. We need to be disciplined.
Q How?
A For instance, reservists. Reservists are a key piece because the reservists are half of our forces. We trained reservists just like any regular forces personnel. Do we need to keep doing this when we’re not deployed? And the answer is no. We’ll live within our reality.
Q How do you respond to concerns about the parking of army support vehicles to save money (non-combat support and civilian vehicles such as heavy and medium trucks, cars, vans and even ambulances)?
A Again it’s about managing the risks. We have an older fleet, an aging fleet, that we couldn’t just keep up in terms of maintaining. So we made a decision. And for that period of time, we’re going to assume a bit of risk in taking off some of the burden of that maintenance. There are enough trucks around to be able to still do our part in reacting to a domestic operation.
Now I’m not saying to you that I might not have to borrow some from some areas of the country to the other one. I’m not saying to you I might not have to borrow some vehicles from civilian counterparts. But given the current situation, the current state of the fleet of the vehicles, those are solutions that could work.
Q What do you think of the government’s requirement that the military not cut personnel to save money?
A It’s about capabilities. What is it that the army needs to have to be able to answer the need? And once we answer that question and we agree what capabilities we need, then the rest flows out of this.
Q What are your thoughts on the recent number of military suicides?
A I never really thought we would have to make a big statement that this is a priority, because it is a priority, intuitively. But when we look at some of the suicides that happened over the last couple of months, we ought to be concerned. And we ought to ask ourselves what it is that we can do, what it is that we can do better? It comes down to leadership. It comes down to awareness.
And it comes down to having the programs in place. And I do think we have those three things. But the synergy between those three things needs to be better aligned, let’s put it this way, across the country. It calls for concern and we need to do better.
Q What are you doing to address the concerns raised in a Maclean’s report this spring about sexual assaults in the military?
A I cannot read this without again getting concerned. We do have some sexual harassment training and awareness training that’s happening on a yearly basis. Does that really work? So maybe we need to ask ourselves that question. We need to understand this a bit better. So I’m concerned about it and we’ll certainly improve and get better in getting to the bottom of this. We don’t have a choice, and it’s not a matter of choice, it’s a matter of doing the right thing for the people.