A short response? I was hoping to give a long one.
On two or three visits overseas, on the day I landed there was a situation where Canadians were either killed or seriously wounded. I had an opportunity to go, literally within hours, to the place where it happened and talk with soldiers, to see how they react and how they reacted to what are extremely traumatic incidents. Time and time again, over the last eight or nine months now, I've been so impressed with how they are able to cope with these challenges.
It's about leadership. It's also about training. It's about talking about these things before deploying overseas. It's about not having a fear of talking about them immediately after the incidents. That's at the sergeant or master corporal level, getting together with their soldiers after an incident like that.
The proof, I suppose, will be in the pudding, and we won't know for some time just how serious or not this issue might be in terms of mental health and critical incident stress and so on. It's an issue that from a force employer perspective I discuss regularly with my command surgeon, as recently as in the last week.
You need to talk to the director general of health services and the surgeon general about this when they appear before you—I think they will be speaking to you—but the early indications, from the first rotation who have just returned to Edmonton, are not causing any alarm bells to sound at this stage.