Thank you for the question, Mr. Chairman.
First of all, let me give my apologies; I'm going to do this in English. My French is getting rustier by the day, so I will not impose upon you or the committee.
Yes, we've had casualties in Afghanistan, but casualties are an inevitable part of the conflict and of what we do as soldiers, and in my mind, given the kinds of operations we've been in, the casualties are relatively light. They're hard for a nation that hasn't seen casualties in a long time, but they are relatively light, and the soldiers feel the same thing.
That doesn't mean to say that every casualty is not important. It's important to all of us; it's specifically important to the soldier who loses the buddy next to him. It is a significant issue, but the dynamic that a soldier goes through when that occurs is principally a focus on getting the job done. As much as it may be painful to lose your best friend, the focus is to get the job done. The first problem comes in the break--in the break in the fighting or in the break in the operation--when you have time to sit back and think about it.
A whole range of academic work has studied this, going back over a century, in terms of war and fighting. I would say that today the Canadian Forces are probably as well prepared as any in the world--and better than I can ever have imagined, given our history--to deal with those kinds of issues of counselling soldiers, helping them deal with their grief, and helping them to get back to the job and move on.
Human nature being what it is, most soldiers will very quickly suppress those concerns as long as they're in the theatre of operations. It will jump out at them again when they get back home. When they get back to Canada, back with the family, the pressure is off, and that's when you'll start to have the problem. That's when, in many cases, post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, is one of the major issues we have to deal with.
I will go back to my point. It is an understandable side effect, and soldiers' morale will be all right as long as a couple of things occur. One is, most importantly, that when they lose a friend and a buddy they can come back and say that he died for a good cause. If they can't, we all have a problem, and that's the source of much of that lack of morale.
The other is that we as an institution--the Canadian Forces and the Government of Canada--help those soldiers with that problem and the aftermath, whatever that may be. As long as those things occur, I don't think you will have a morale problem. That doesn't mean it's not difficult for every soldier to deal with a death, but it will not be a morale problem.