E.R. Campbell said:
Reports are surfacing, today, in the media, about an internal DND audit that has found costs for the cadet program have jumped by 40 per cent over the last 20 years while numbers of participants have dropped by 15 per cent. The JCR programme, on the other hand, was given high marks, by the auditor, who noted that JCR provided a structured youth program in communities that often have few such programs and a growing number of young people.
“There is evidence of need for the JCR Program and less evidence of continued need for the Cadet Program,” the report said.
There are 50,000+ young people in cadets and 3,500 in JCR.
One cannot help but wonder if there are not many thousands of young people in urban centres who lack structured programmes and who might benefit from something like JCR, something which might be offered using resources taken away from the 50,000 middle class, suburban kids in cadet uniforms today.
Note: I know nothing about cadets; nothing about who they are, where they are or what they do; but I can read audit reports and draw conclusions ~ so can government ministers who know as little as I and care even less.
One of the major points the study doesn't mention is that the way of accounting for costs incurred by the CCO changed during that period. Many goods and services that were rendered by the CF buckshee to the cadet program but were accounted as part of overall defence spending were suddenly split off and charged against the CCO specifically. One example of this is logistical support for field training exercises. We might get the local militia unit volunteering to provide vehicles and drivers, we'd draw hayboxes of rations from a mess that knew we were coming but did not account for specific numbers, etc with costs either not charged to the cadet account or, at least, done at a flat rate. Now, as with the rest of DND, every single line item is charged for against the CCO budget. As someone who was in the system on both sides of that accounting change, the funds reported as being spent jumped DRASTICALLY.
One of the things I do take a bit of an exception to is some comments I've seen about the "professional COATS cadre". On reason that exists is the continual budget cutting since the 80s caused the CF to withdraw a lot of their direct Reg and PRes support (administrative, logistical and, especially, affiliated unit), caused a vacuum that had to be filled. The people at DCadets aren't taking the military out of the cadet program, the military did that, by necessity caused by the budget cuts, themselves.
Why don't air cadets get to fire the C7s now when I used to spend weekends firing the FN as a cadet? Cadet regs allow us to but CIC members can't get trained to train them or run a range, so we rely on Reg or PRes units to volunteer to train them, run a range AND provide the ammo out of their own allotment. Who's going to do that? So, now they do almost all marksmanship training using air rifles.
It's the same right down the line. It's not that we're avoiding military training, we can't get the access anymore so the alternative is, much to my disgust, going with the readily available civilian version.
During the time I was an air cadet, I got famil flights in a Chinook (before BM the PM sold them), learned to taxi a Tutor, fired several kinds of CF small arms, took many cool tours of CF facilities and got to handle a lot of equipment, and on and on. Though I try my hardest to give my cadets as many of those kinds of opportunities as I can, most of those opportunities will never be available to them again.
