Just my 2 cents, but I think much of the problem at St. Jean is in the upper tiers of the school. I just finished BOTC and am on SLT now and I can say without a doubt that our platoon staff were stellar - knowledgeable, competent, enthusiastic, dedicated and fair. There seem to have been some changes at St. Jean since last year when I did my IAP, though our staff then were excellent too (1 Mcpl, 1 Sgt, and another Sgt. as platoon commander - times were tight, it would seem). The primary and gleaming problem I saw wasn't with the instructing staff but with upper management.
Maybe it was a misperception, but it seems like there's a substantial amount of disdain felt by the higher-ups towards the trainees. What little we DID hear from the senior school leadership consisted primarily of malicious, inconsistent directives which our staff had to contend with, temper-tantrum speeches aimed at doing little more than insulting everyone in the room (I missed out on this, happily), and a spectacular PRB fiasco wherein injured personnel were jerked about for a few days (after receiving their temper tantrum speech), thrown back into the field with new platoons, given field PRB's, then sent back to St. Jean to graduate with their original platoons after a day or two, with the exception of one guy who had the gusto (and a destroyed knee) to voice dissent at his PRB - he got a full recourse and a stint on PAT platoon - after all, can't have the administration's gleaming errors pointed out to them, can we?
Now, understandably there were some MIR commandos that probably deserved to get sent back into the field as an object lesson but there were also quite a few people with legitimate problems - heat stroke & severe dehydration, infected feet, stress fractures, etc, not to mention the people that just wanted to get some Second Skin or other minor 1st aid materials and return the same day but got sent all the way back to St. Jean because the Farnham MIR couldn't handle the volume. To add insult to injury, they lowered the distances between tasking sites, the # of work hours/day, and added scheduled eating times, all in response (apparently) to the injury rate of our course (20 MIRs on one day from my platoon of 57, not sure of the rate for the other pltns on the course) - all this after having shit all over anyone who visited the MIR for any reason (incidentally, I didn't MIR). Make up your mind - either it's the workload or they're weak - pick one and stick with it.
I have a great deal of respect and appreciation for the instructional staff at St. Jean but very little for the senior admin/leadership (with exceptions). It seems all they achieved was to make the staff's jobs harder and inspire nothing more than abject hatred in the trainees. On the flipside, though, they did serve as examples of how NOT to be (with exceptions, again). The inconsistencies in standards and training, I think, have less to do with the standards cell or poor instructors than with shifting, often conflicting, whimsical directives handed down by the senior administration, seemingly monthly changes in the training plans given to the staff, and a structure/work environment (for the staff, not the students) that's inconsistent and changes form more often than I change my underwear. I feel sorry for the staff, I really do.