National Defence Committee on April 15th, 2008

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

I have one last question. We can see that there's a lot of rotation and involvement in a mission abroad, especially in Afghanistan. Do you see an increased number of mental impacts on the military? Would you say there's a growing trend? Do you see more impact than in other deployments?

[Beth Corey]

Locally I don't have the stats on that, but Theresa may have some.

[Theresa Sabourin]

I certainly can't comment on the military, but what I can say is that in Petawawa that's part of the reason for our partnership with the Phoenix Centre for Children and Families and their children's mental health services. We went from 10 families to 90 families that were expressing serious issues relating to their own mental health and the mental health of their children that they were directly linking back to the service of their military member.

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

From 10 to 90?

[Theresa Sabourin]

Yes, it went from 10 families identifying to 90 families presenting within about a year.

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

Thank you.

[Theresa Sabourin]

Might I provide a little bit of clarity on that? Perhaps I wasn't very clear with my other comment pertaining to when military members are diagnosed. In that case, the linkages are very clear and relatively well established. When it is not a diagnosis, that is when there is the lag time and often, due to the lack of psychiatric capacity, diagnoses take a while.

When family members see some difficulties and some challenges, and they think their loved one has some concerns and issues, they don't really have an alternative presently within the system that they can go to for support. So I think that would be a number one recommendation.

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

Thank you very much. I think that's well heard, and will be well taken into consideration.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you very much.

That ends our opening round. Now, for the second round, over to the official opposition....

You're pat? Okay.

We'll go to Mr. Lunney for five minutes, and then we'll go back to the Bloc if Mr. Bachand has more questions.

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

Thank you.

I thank you for coming and for your service to the military families. It's front-line work, a lot of grassroots involvement. We all recognize the military being tasked with challenging assignments recently, with a lot more stress on not only the soldiers but on their families.

Certainly the family is an important thing that has to be talked about. We hear a lot of times from the military family. I think someone made reference to whether the military culture is a little bit different from the rest of society in general. There is this camaraderie and fellowship in the military that isn't found in every community. I witnessed that when I visited Trenton--not any of the bases that you are directly working with--over the summer in the MP program, and I was really impressed with the team work and camaraderie and the focus and discipline in the military, which we certainly appreciate.

Family is important. We certainly have to see the family supported. I think we have heard some of the concerns that you've raised here about the services and availability.

Some of you have been on the front lines for some time. I wanted to ask about the efforts the military has made in recent times with the soldiers coming back, the debriefing, the stopover in Cyprus for a little time for the soldiers to spend some time together before they end up back in their civilian environment, the other lives that they've left behind, and the peer support program. I would like you to comment on how you value that and comment on whether you see improvement related to those initiatives.

[Theresa Sabourin]

I think with respect to the four days, there's a lot of opportunity to decompress. There's also a lot of education and information that is passed to the soldier in regard to going from the site of operations back into home--how to make that transition successfully, and what some of the challenges have been that perhaps a family has faced to help them have an understanding of what they're going back to. It's called battlemind training.

Simultaneously, we do battlemind training for spouses as well, and that's an opportunity to bring spouses together to help inform and educate them as to some of the stressors and some of the realities their loved ones have experienced, to perhaps give them a bit of a bird's eye view as to where they're coming from and why. If perhaps they come home and they're not necessarily as warm and loving towards the family, that may not necessarily be a big issue, because they need some time to reintegrate into the family. From a family perspective, increasing the awareness and helping people normalize and understand their expectations are really very valuable.

Of course, what we've heard is that the anticipation at that stage is almost a bit overwhelming. They want them home now, so four days is four more days to have to wait. I think the fact that they're being educated, and the fact that they are understanding and being equipped with some tools to be able to help navigate those initial days and whatnot, does add great value.

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

Thank you.

Does anybody else want to comment or add to those comments?

There was a remark about the number of professionals. We know there's a shortage of professionals. The military is working hard on trying to recruit more. The numbers are certainly increasing, but the need is great. We know that in society, in general, there's a shortage of physicians right across the country. We have communities that are advertising different things: we'll pay this, we'll pay off your student loans, we'll pay you an extra bonus of $100,000 just to come to our community. It's a bit of a challenge to recruit doctors into the military when there's such a shortage. That's just something we're experiencing as a nation. In general, we want to get more resources in to address these needs.

I'm particularly interested in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder and so on. I guess it's not your position to respond to this, other than in terms of availability, but we had a soldier here recently talking about treatment. We've had others talk about their outcomes and the challenges they're facing. We had some very encouraging responses with EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization and reprogramming.

Do you have any comments on whether you've seen these treatments being applied successfully? Are they available, less available? Are there any comments on what your observations are from the grassroots?

[Theresa Sabourin]

I'm sorry, I don't have any.

[Beth Corey]

I don't either.

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

Okay, thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

Mr. Bachand, five minutes for the questions.

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Ms. Thompson, how many family resource centres are there in Canada?

[Celine Thompson]

We have 32 incorporated, not-for-profit organizations in Canada. Those individual entities don't count sites. A number of them will have outreach offices as well, but there are 32 bona fide corporations.

We have five centres in Europe and the United Kingdom. We also have three centres in the United States and three outreach offices in the United States.

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

What is the overall operating budget? Does each centre have a separate budget?

[Celine Thompson]

Everything gets paid out of the same pot. It's about $20.5 million currently.

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

You say there are 32 family resource centres. However, I would imagine that not every base has its own centre. I can't imagine that Alert in Canada's Arctic has a family resource centre. How can we talk about geographic equity in Canada? Generally speaking, are service levels comparable from one region to another? Are there some locations where no services at all are provided?

[Celine Thompson]

I wouldn't say so. My rule of thumb is that if there are 20 families, I'll fund it. As a result, we have those organizations overseas. One of those locations is Naples, Italy, for example, where I think the last count of families was 26.

But the isolation and some of the frustration, as well as the deployability of our families there, mean that I have an obligation to ensure they have resources to set up a core of support there.

Looking across the Canadian Forces, again, last I looked, we had no families in Alert, so we're good. But I can't think of a base, wing, or detachment that we have where we don't have some kind of physical presence.

The outreach offices that the MFRCs have largely initiated to be able to reach the reserve populations as well as their more distant ones actually give us an even larger footprint. So Winnipeg operates an organization in Thunder Bay, for example. Colleen has several offices over the province of Nova Scotia.

Our smaller organizations, like London and some of the detachments in Ontario, again, are spread out further.

We expanded our population a year and a half ago to include parents of our serving members as well. I believe we're the only program that does that. Those parents have the annoying habit of not living anywhere close to a CF establishment, so they've created some real challenges for us to reach out to those virtual families.

[Claude Bachand, Bloc, Saint-Jean, QC]

One way of avoiding problems is to ensure that soldiers are able to keep in touch with their families while deployed in a theatre of war. I think this is good for troop morale. I saw this first hand when I visited Bosnia. Each soldier had been given a phone card to keep in touch with family.

Are soldiers on deployment given enough opportunities to communicate with their families, whether by mail or telephone? They should also have access to webcams. I read one interesting story about a soldier who, thanks to a webcam, was able to see his child who had been born only a few hours earlier.

If Canadian Forces provided more opportunities for soldiers to correspond and communicate with their families, do you think this would have a positive impact on them?

[Celine Thompson]

I've seen those touching stories as well. It's absolutely heartbreaking, watching the babies being born and having their dads see them for the first time on camera.

I believe all of these organizations have video terminals, so I'll turn that question over to them. They'll know more than I will about family usage.

[Colleen Calvert]

I can just talk very briefly. All of the sailors get telephone cards, and I'm pretty sure the army does, too.

We have video conferencing facilities with Afghanistan, with Kandahar, so all the members can just book a time. Families can come in 24 hours a day, seven days a week and have live video conferencing. And in addition to that, there is morale mail that is provided as well, so I think the Canadian Forces is doing quite well in that area.