New Canadians need not fear Canadian military, says Army Commander Deschamps

By William Doyle-Marshall
The upper echelon of the Canadian Air Force does not reflect the current diversified Canadian society. Lieutenant-General André Deschamps the new Commander made this admission during a round table discussion with members of the National Ethnic Press and Media Council.
Deschamps admitted this is one of the military’s challenges as the service is not very visible in the big centers like Toronto and Vancouver, where the country’s diversified cultures exist.
“Because we are not very visible and present it is hard for them (ethnic communities) to understand what they can contribute to the Air Force,” Deschamps said. Consequently his meeting with ethnic media personnel was one step to address the situation.
The air force administration is certainly feeling a lot of pressure to get the right balance of people in so it would be viable for the next ten, 15 or 20 years. The Commander of the Air Force is aware of the need to rebalance otherwise it’s going to be difficult to sustain. He and his recruitment team understand if they don’t get people coming in, in the right numbers, with the right quality sustaining the force in the future would be very difficult.
With this in mind there is an outreach programme to attract members from Canada’s diversified communities so that they get to understand there is a role for them to play in national security.
Changing the face of the military is vital so there is a definite need to include the diversified Canadians so they would be inside the agency. The Air Force is certainly a case in point where our population is aging and there are two existing demographics. “We have the very young new people coming in and we have the exit crowd, myself included, at the end of their service career and we have a big hole in the middle where we should have experience people – the 15, 20-year experience. But we lost those people in the downsizing in the mid nineties,” Lieutenant General Deschamps who took over command of the Air Force at the beginning of October explained.
With respect to new Canadians in communities that typically would not be very pro-military, the commander noted “Culturally it is something they don’t feel comfortable with. So I think we have a decade where we have to overcome that bias where people that are new Canadians or just coming to Canada are either fearful of the military, don’t trust the military; they don’t think it is a career that they want their families or their children to be in. So we have to overcome those barriers otherwise we would have significant challenges in the coming decade to find enough good people to populate our Canadian Forces because we need that large chunk of demographic in the military to make sure we have the right people but also it is the right of balance of people so that Canada is represented in this military,” Deschamps added.
The Air Force’s recruiting centers, through advertising are trying to reach out to those communities that typically are coming in from countries where the military is not seen as a positive force in their country. The Canadian military is one of the most highly trained and respected forces in the world. Above all, the Canadian Forces value strength of character, and team contributions. On its website promoting diversity the force stresses “regardless of your gender, religion or ethnicity, the Canadian Forces invite you be a part of its team and to explore the opportunities it has to offer”.
In the meantime, the Air Force’s key role is to protect Canada and to do that it has bases across the country for search and rescue effort, domestic airspace surveillance and control. It supports other government agencies like the RCMP and provincial police. This year alone its security operations included the Vancouver Olympics, G8- G20 Summits. “We have a lot of assets we can bring to help – communications and surveillance – so we bring those capabilities to help our government partners through their primary mandates of these security operations,” the commander emphasized.
Its air wing consists of helicopters and tactical mobility equipment used for supporting the army as well as the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles that are flown from ground stations in support of the army operation on the ground in Afghanistan.
“To be able to support what we do in Afghanistan requires a fully large effort because the Chinook doesn’t exist in Canada. We bought six of them just for Afghanistan so we had to actually find the people within our existing structure – technician and air personnel -- to take them to the U.S. to train them on the Chinooks and then deploy them and we have to keep doing this for two years.”
December 8, 2010