National Defence Committee on June 17th, 2008

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, General Hillier, and to the rest of the folks for being here.

First of all, again, I just want to add my thanks to the others for your many decades of service.

[Gen Rick Hillier]

You make me feel old when you say “many decades of service”.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I'm sorry, for several years.

You and I first met on January 24, 2006. It was at Cold Lake, in Edmonton, the day after the last election, and we were meeting Franklin, Bailey, and Salikin, who were coming back from Afghanistan, and all of them were in pretty bad shape. There has been a lot of progress since then for those three gentlemen, some more than others. We've seen a lot of change in the whole aspect of health care for our men and women.

You talk about the troops, about the soldier, sailor, airman, or airwoman, feeling valued. I'd like to say a couple of words about the soldier as a family unit, or about the family. The soldier is not just the soldier, but it's the family and how we've gone about trying to treat the soldier as a family unit.

[Gen Rick Hillier]

First of all, Mr. Hawn, thank you for mentioning those three fine young soldiers. I had the opportunity to spend Saturday night at a gala ball for the Military Families Fund in Calgary with Master Corporal Paul Franklin, his wife Audra, and his mother-in-law.

I've also had the chance to see Will Salikin, incredible young man that he is, and Corporal Jeffrey Bailey, massive young man that he is, many times since they were wounded. We had almost given up hope that those last two young men were actually going to be with us today, and we view this as a real miracle.

Paul Franklin is my personal hero. Every day when I get out of bed and hobble around my room with my creaking bones and aching muscles, whining and whinging about it, I stop, shut up, and think about Paul Franklin and what he goes through to live the life he's living.

We have had a revolution in how we look at the military family. We're going against hundreds of years of British army tradition that became Canadian army tradition. I jokingly tell audiences that we used to have the saying in the army, “If the army had wanted you to have a family, they would have issued you one.” That's how we treated people. That was the attitude we had. We have changed that attitude significantly. The Military Families Fund gala in Calgary on Saturday night, where 550 Canadians came out to pay tribute, is just one indicator that the change is starting to take root.

We include the family in all we do. We include the family in briefings, preparations, and discussions of the missions that we're going on. We have a deployment support centre at every major base or unit, and they have reached out to those families in a way that we had never even contemplated when we were doing operations back in the nineties and eighties and seventies.

We have brought them in to make sure they always know what's going on, and we support them in a variety of ways. We help prepare those families—we don't necessarily do it very well, but we're working at it—to help in the reintegration when their loved one comes home from mission. Sometimes there might be some problems, but in the majority of cases, no. We help them to be able to reintegrate their family and carry on with their normal family life. We have done that in a whole variety of ways. We have the chain of command and the family structure on side.

What we've also had to do, though—and I do this personally—is tap the families on the shoulder once in a while and say, “Okay, this can't be all us.” I went to Edmonton and sat down with 12 wives in the MFRC. The husbands of nine wives had just come home after six months and the husbands of three of the wives were still there for the nine-month tour. I said, “How many of you have used the services here at MFRC?” Several of them said they hadn't at all. Several said they didn't know anything about the services. And there were a variety of other comments. I said, “How many actually attended the briefings that were going on?” Actually, very few of them had attended at that stage.

We've changed that dynamic. But still, there is a responsibility on the wife, the husband, and the family. When we give them the invitation and say, “We're going to walk through this and we're going to talk to the challenges”, they have a responsibility to meet us halfway. That's the other side of the coin. We're working with families every day to do that.

We have actually changed how the MFRC supports our families. There was a successful coming together of the leaders of the MFRCs in Toronto on the 23rd and 24th of May. And I had an opportunity to walk through where we need to change, where we need to put the emphasis and resources, and how we can do things better. We don't want to be just a silo in Petawawa. We want to take lessons from Halifax, Bagotville, and Edmonton.

We've had some incredibly positive feedback. I was in Edmonton. On Sunday afternoon, I flew directly there from the Calgary ball the night before, and I had the opportunity to visit with two soldiers, both of whom had recently returned. One was Private Anthony Price, a 22-year-old soldier who was wounded in the arm and shoulder. What an incredible young man. He has all the support he needs and is well on his way to recovery. He cannot wait to go back to the mission, and he wants to go back before his rotation is finished. So that's our goal with him, to let him do that.

The second guy was Major Mark Campbell. He was there with his wife Donna, who is a warrant officer in the Canadian Forces. Also present were his 9-year-old daughter Meaghan and his son, Steven, 12 years old. Just sitting and talking with that family for an hour, I could tell that they have the support they need. They feel like they're wrapped in our arms, and our arms are your arms, all the way around here, because you are the political leaders of our country, and that means a lot to them.

So we've made some progress. We've made some dramatic progress. Do we still have a long way to go? Yes, we do.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

I'll share what I have left with Mr. Blaney.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Lévis—Bellechasse, QC]

General Hillier, thank you for being with us today. Thank you also for bringing LCol Grenier. As you have just mentioned, this demonstrates the considerable progress that has been made in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. We are coming to the end of our study, and I add my voice to the chorus of admiration that you have heard. You personify the renewal of the Canadian Forces, I feel. They are going to miss you, Canadians are going to miss you. We are also happy with those who will succeed you. I am thinking specifically of General Semianiw, from Thetford Mines, a boy from the asbestos belt.

This study has allowed me to see post-traumatic stress disorder and mental health issues in the Canadian Forces in a less dramatic light. Some reactions are normal when people come back from a mission where they have lived through certain experiences. I feel that our study lets us understand that. We also understand that the army is much more sensitive to it and that considerable progress has been made.

I would like to share with you a message that we received from family members when we went to Valcartier. It is not just the deployment that puts pressure on soldiers and their families, it is also what precedes the deployment, when they have to spend several months elsewhere. The constant deployment and redeployment of the troops puts pressure, not only on the troops themselves, but also on their families. That is what they told us. Several of my colleagues were with me, and that message had an effect on us. They told us also not to forget military parents. There are not just husbands and wives, there are children and moms and dads. We were moved by that.

That is what I wanted to say in the minute I had. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

I'm afraid we're going to have to stop with that, sir. We'll get back to you, maybe, in the second round here. That ends the first round.

Mr. McGuire, you're going to start the second round. These are five-minute spots.

[Joe McGuire, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

I'll try to split this with Anthony.

As the Atlantic contingent here, General, I just want to congratulate you on the job you have done for the Canadian Forces and for Canada. Newfoundlanders are particularly pleased with your efforts and what you've done for the country. Danny Williams seems to be quite happy that you don't have any political ambitions in Newfoundland.

[Gen Rick Hillier]

Danny Williams thinks I'm his chief of defence staff.

[Joe McGuire, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

I'd like you to answer Steven's question. A lot of the families think their husbands—and in some cases their wives—are away much too much, much too long, for pre-training, training, and they come back and they train more, they're training somebody else to go, and they're at their second or third deployments.

Mentally, it's very stressful for all concerned. We're just wondering how many deployments our relatively small forces can take before there are very serious repercussions on the mental health of those families and their ability to stay together as a family. Maybe you could answer that and Steven's question.

[Gen Rick Hillier]

I think the key word here is “balance”. We've known, since time immemorial, that time away adds to the stress and that time away with risk added to it adds to the stress even more.

When I was a brigade commander in Petawawa in the mid-1990s, the families used to tell me that they didn't mind a deployment into Bosnia for six or seven months at a time, but it was the three- to five-month workup training added to that that led to a year of separation. They said they'd actually put up with the tour, if they could do away with the pre-deployment training. So we worked significantly to reduce that time away, when people were back home in Canada. We trained them locally as much as possible; we trained Monday to Friday and they were home on the weekends. We had some success with that.

When we got into the Afghanistan operation, however, we realized that we had lost a lot during the intervening decades since World War II and Korea. In order to do justice to our young men and women, and to their families, and to give them every chance of going into Afghanistan and being successful in executing the missions that we asked them to execute, and at the same time being ready in all the ways I talked about in my opening remarks, we actually had to expand that front-end pre-deployment training in a huge way so that the risk to them was reduced to the lowest level possible. We did that, and that added another stressor. But we did it after considering all the risks that would occur if we didn't do it.

We have now reached a stage where we have sufficient experience across the Canadian Forces, particularly in the land forces that are executing the bulk of that mission, that we are now cutting the pre-deployment training. I just had conversations with the army commander, Lieutenant-General Leslie, and we are now reducing that pre-deployment training, and therefore the time away from home, by six to seven weeks, which is a significant chunk of time. We're also doing more training and more front-end preparation in the local training area as much as we possibly can, and constraining to one very specific pocket a major deployment in western Canada.

For the rotations themselves, we guarantee 12 months back home in Canada, unless there's a very real reason, and then we have a discussion with those individuals. The reality is that it's between 18 and 24 months for much of the Canadian Forces and actually longer than that for the majority.

We have some small parts of the Canadian Forces that have closer to 12 months back home in Canada, and that's the part we'd like to stretch out. We do that in a variety of ways: by having taskings from outside the army in a huge way by asking if we actually need a soldier in that job or is this a skill set that a sailor, airman, or airwoman could bring in, and therefore task from outside, to reduce that stress level on soldiers; by keeping tours, ideally, with somewhere between 18 and 24 months guaranteed at home with their families, and guaranteed at home so they don't have pre-deployment training kicking in for long periods of time; and we try to keep the duration of rotations at what we believe is the maximum best-value duration, and we know that somewhere between six to seven months is about right.

We get a great return on the immense investment we put in for the build-up and train-up. We get a great return in-theatre where people take a couple of months to learn the environment and then that last couple of weeks they are really focused on handing off to the next individuals coming in. So we want the maximum amount of time when they're at their very best to get the effect. So we know it's around six to seven months, and that's what we're trying to stay to. I think we're going to be successful at doing that for most of the folks, particularly the battle groups themselves outside.

So the combination of right tour lengths, right periods of time back here in Canada with their family's support in the right way between those tours, and to actually intelligently and ruthlessly shape the pre-deployment training to reduce the time away from their families as much as possible allows you to be able to carry on careers over a significantly longer period of time.

I will tell you that one of the things we are looking at is having folks spend one or two basic engagements at four years each in the combat arms and then moving large numbers of them into combat service support trades around the Canadian Forces, so that their next missions are very different from those. So there are a variety of measures. But a sailor, a soldier, an airman, or airwoman, is going to expect to spend their time deploying, and we're asking how we can do that in balance so that we have a healthy family, a healthy individual in uniform, and actually have conditions set for success in the longer term.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you, sir.

Ms. Gallant.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

First of all, General Hillier, I'd like to tell you how very fitting it is that we have Colonel Grenier with us today. I understand he is the founder of the operational stress injury service, OSIS.

I'm very pleased to hear about your emphasis on family. That's the basis of my question. With the exception of families of serving soldiers in very remote regions of Canada, it is a provincial responsibility to take care of the families. Nevertheless--minimizing as many stressors as possible on the part of the soldier, especially when deployed--the care for a sick spouse or child at the time of deployment can be paramount in their minds. With this in mind, and given that it is a provincial responsibility, can you make any recommendations--with the exception of building bases closer to urban centres--that the committee could act upon or make recommendations for so that the families can be cared for on a medical basis?

[Gen Rick Hillier]

I'm not sure what recommendations I can make that would go outside the Canadian Forces purview, if you will. We've considered the family and the impact upon the family of the operational stress injuries, PTSD, and other injuries. We've considered all of that and the fact that, holistically, you should be able to treat the family together. In some cases we do that, even though that's not our mandate, because we have no recourse for some small number of situations. You know the Canada Health Act proscribes us from doing that. Actually, even if we could, we are not even close to having the resources, specialists, and people in place. We're still struggling to get them in place for our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and airwomen, let alone that huge number of people who would constitute their families.

I suggest perhaps a partnership with the provinces where we have those issues that are most stark. Ontario and New Brunswick are those cases in point. If we'd had the civilian specialists in and around the Pembroke-Petawawa area, maybe we wouldn't have had such a challenge. Can we work better with Ontario? Can we work better with the Canadian Medical Association, with the Canadian Nurses Association to actually be able to set that up?

It's not to entice people to go there permanently if they don't want to, but maybe to get use of their services on a consistent, temporary basis. That's one of the things we've started doing with the OSISS clinic, moving people from here in Ottawa to Petawawa on that consistent routine basis. So I suggest maybe a better partnership with Ontario, a better partnership with New Brunswick, and working together to see where we can go, because right now it is a challenge. We know that. Petawawa and Gagetown perhaps, too, are the greatest challenges.

Beyond that, I wish I did have a clear answer to offer, but I think a partnership with those provinces is going to be the fundamental base on which we can build something better than what we have now.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Mr. Lunney, you have two minutes.

[James Lunney, Conservative, Nanaimo—Alberni, BC]

Thank you.

I just want to acknowledge the tremendous steps you've made going forward in rebuilding the military health delivery system. We know there was quite a deficit overcome. Increasing the number of mental health professionals—I believe you just mentioned that 218 was the number—is a proactive step, as are pre- and post-deployment training and screening for mental health issues. I also want to acknowledge the aggressive stance you've taken on the mental health education campaign for both men and women.

Decompression wasn't mentioned on that list, but I think the decompression time the soldiers have coming back is tremendously valuable.

I want to just go back to the question of sleep deprivation, and we addressed this earlier, but there is a notion that something has changed with our soldiers recently, in the sense that they have time zone issues and they have the stress of combat. I know even for members here, we get out of our intense little combat zone here at the House, as it's sometimes described, and we need some time to just sort of chill out in the evening when we get home, and we have various ways of doing that, I suppose.

I noticed that a lot of the soldiers carry electronic gadgets with them, which is something new in this era, and they spend a lot of time on computers or computer games, but their sleep is a challenge. This came up when we were in Valcartier visiting your base surgeon there, Chantal...I forget the rest of her name. In fact, when they're doing sleep therapy sessions with the soldiers, they find there's tremendous improvement in some of the soldiers who were manifesting what might have been diagnosed as post-traumatic stress or operational stress injuries.

I'm just wondering, sir, whether that's something that is on your radar. I mention it to you because we've discussed it with your medical officers. Is that something on your radar, and is it perhaps something we could look into, helping our soldiers get sleep? I'm not talking about drugs, but just dealing with the fact that they need rest. That's an important part of maintaining mental health.

[Gen Rick Hillier]

Without making light of it all, I'd like to start with myself, if I could.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Excuse me, General, but we're tight for time, and I think you're going to have to take that under advisement.

We'll move over to Mr. Bouchard for five minutes.

[Robert Bouchard, Bloc, Chicoutimi—Le Fjord, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Welcome, General, and welcome to the witness with you.

I share everything that has been said about the work you have done as CDS. A man of your abilities is not going to be sitting at home in a rocking-chair in your retirement. So may I also wish you a pleasant and successful second career.

We have visited several military bases and were able to meet the staff at the Multi-Service Family Resource Centres on those bases. A number of the managers told us how hard it is to find funding for their activities or to hire people.

What funding should the Department of National Defence provide to these Family Resource Centres? They are where families are helped to come together again and family members in difficulty receive support.

[Gen Rick Hillier]

Sir, we have changed dramatically what we're doing here. The VCDS just went through, with oversight from me and the deputy minister, our planning process for what all the stresses and demands are, where the money needs to be headed to get certain effects, and he has allocated significantly more moneys here. I'd perhaps ask the chief of military personnel to talk specifically to it here.

It goes a little bit back to the question asked over here. We're looking at things holistically. We are not trying to treat an operational stress injury or morale or any of those things as little individual silos. We know that all things impact, they truly do. Whether it's looking at nutrition, diet, or healthy lifestyle, whether it's looking at helping people sleep and therefore be less stressed, or whether it's helping the family resource centres support the families in a better manner, we've been trying to work toward all those things over these past days, weeks, months, and now several years.

Maybe I could ask General Semianiw, please, to jump in on that one.

[Major-General Walter Semianiw, Chief of Military Personnel, Department of National Defence]

Thank you very much, sir.

As the chief stated, we sat with tous les MFRCs across Canada for two days at a symposium in Toronto. We asked them what it was they needed us to do for them so that they could support their families. With those individuals, we have begun to develop a holistic approach. The chief and the leadership of the Canadian Forces will very shortly be receiving what we call a covenant--that is, the Canadian Forces' commitment to our families--that lays out very clearly what that is.

That will then lead us into an examination of several different areas that have been touched on here in some way. What do we do for our families when men and women are deployed? We think we do good; we could do better, as the chief said. What will we provide them to support in the housing area? What could we provide when it comes to medical support? If they have to go around the country and find doctors, what could we do?

So we're examining all of this in a holistic fashion. As the chief has provided, with his direction and guidance there will be an improved program for the beginning of next year. It's a program that will build on the strength of the program we have today and a program that will see us address all of these areas in a much broader way to better support the families. In January of next year, with all of the MFRCs from across the country, we will announce a new and improved program.

[Gen Rick Hillier]

With more money.

[MGen Walter Semianiw]

With more money; at the top--I made the commitment in Toronto—we've looked at about $50 million. That's what I've already talked to the Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff about. That's what we need to expand the program, and that's the commitment of the Canadian Forces leadership to that program.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you, Mr. Bouchard.

General, I know we're a little over time, but if you have just five more minutes....

[Gen Rick Hillier]

I won't take even five minutes, Mr. Chairman--