National Defence committee  Definitely, as I said before, one needs to look at the internal mechanism of our system in place to manage this. When you have a base wing surgeon or a doctor on a base somewhere and they need people, and because of the local community they can hire people, they have to revert to

National Defence committee  Thank you very much. Your work is important, and I appreciate your interest.

National Defence committee  We have started a study of the care provided to reservists for PTSD because we realized that reservists have brought about a 20% increase in the number of soldiers on operations. When they are on operations with members of the Regular Forces, they are employed under a Class C con

National Defence committee  When we did that report we tried for balance, and I think we have a balanced report. We have had no challenge to the veracity of what we're saying. We do mention what's better now. The forces have done better things over the years. There's more capability. There's the leadership

National Defence committee  The "Reserved Care" report that we submitted in November dealt with care services for reservists. Ordinarily, when we submit a report like that, we follow up afterward. We can certainly take a look at what you have raised. In that report, we did note that reservists did not have

National Defence committee  Based on my ministerial directive from the Minister of National Defence, in my mandate it does say that I should have an advisory committee that should meet a few times a year. It's kind of a sounding board contributing to our debate, discussion or brainstorming on how we can mov

National Defence committee  I will ask Mary to expand on what I'm going to say. Obviously, as I said before, from 2002 to 2008 there weren't a lot of initiatives by the department. A lot of effort, money, and initiatives have put services in place for the ill and injured across the country to replace an ad

National Defence committee  Mr. Chair, we have not looked at the wages that reservists lose in this situation. When we prepared the report entitled "Fortitude Under Fatigue", we realized there had been no studies done about mental health care for reservists. When reservists return from a deployment, they r

National Defence committee  We are starting a study now that will be published at the end of the year, dealing with what we call operational stress injuries for reservists. We will be looking at that issue. In the report we published in November, on medical care for reservists serving in Canada, and this w

National Defence committee  Mr. Chair, if you look in our report, we do explain at one point how we did that. For this particular report, “Fortitude Under Fatigue”, which has to do with PTSD and OSI, as I said I have a team with different backgrounds who visited about 10 bases just for this particular issue

National Defence committee  There's a way of doing that. When we produce a report, we give the system, the department and Canadian Forces, time to implement our recommendations. This particular report is our third follow-up. We started with 31 recommendations in 2002, and now we're down to six. As we move a

National Defence committee  If you look at our report, we made six recommendations. The first four recommendations were agreed to by the CDS and the Canadian Forces. The fifth one was agreed to halfway, because it has to do with the relations between the commanders and the doctors in terms of sharing inform

National Defence committee  You mentioned our office, and you're right. We are looking at facts, collating facts, meeting people. It took 10 months, 500 people, and 600 documents to write the report. My role is to look at the facts, identify what could be improved, and make recommendations to the minister.

National Defence committee  Maybe I'll ask Mary to expound on that. I read about the privacy issue in the minutes of the committee here. I don't think we've addressed that. To do so you need to have a system in place. You don't need to know the number, the people as such, the names, and so on.

National Defence committee  Yes. This database would give us a pretty good scope of how many people we'd be looking at. People say we need $50 million for mental health care. To do what? To treat how many people? To put where? A base commander told me once that the allocation of resources is not proportion