Mr. Chair and members, my name is Jim Price. As the chair has indicated, I am the acting chair of the Canadian Forces Grievance Board. With me is Caroline Maynard, our director of legal services.
To give my own background, I retired in 2003 from the Canadian Forces after 37 years of service, the last 23 as a legal officer and military judge. I was appointed vice-chair of the grievance board in December 2004 for a term of four years. Currently the chair's office is vacant, so I have assumed that role as well.
I think I will start off with a short background on how the Canadian Forces Grievance Board came to be. It was part of very substantial amendments made to the National Defence Act in 1998 by Bill C-25. That involved the big post-Somali amendments largely having to do with military justice.
At that time, in 1998, the grievance system was also rejigged. There had been a number of studies in the mid-nineties showing that the grievance system was slow and lacked transparency. The minister was the final authority in the process, which was not seen to be a good thing. Bill C-25 created a two-stage process, initial authority and final authority, and made the Chief of the Defence Staff the final authority rather than the minister.
With respect to the board per se, it was seen that an outside independent agency—and that's what we are, a quasi-judicial tribunal, not connected to National Defence—would add to the adjudicative fairness of the grievance process and would generally bolster confidence in the system.
It's important to understand that the grievance board is not a decision-making body; that is the chief, who is the final authority. What we do is make findings and recommendations in certain types of cases to the chief, and the chief, if he or she does not agree with our findings and recommendations, must say so in the final decision. The chief must personally adjudicate the files that come from the board, which the board has reviewed. All of the other files are done by the chief's delegate.
The subject matter jurisdiction we have is limited by regulation. Essentially it's involuntary release, harassment, pay and allowances, medical, and dental. The effect of the regulatory restriction is that we see only 40% of the grievances at the CDS level. I can tell you that we have been talking to the Canadian Forces about expanding our mandate.
We wonder, if the purpose of the existence of this board is to bolster confidence in the grievance system, why we can't see all of the grievances. I should say, too, that the Canadian Forces are not resisting this. We've been talking about it for the past year, and we have some more talking to do. We feel this is an important thing that we want to pursue.
One of the subject matter areas we have is medical care. You will see from the briefing note I have supplied to you that we have only actually seen 12 grievances on the quality of medical care--19 grievances on post-traumatic stress syndrome. I should add that these are not, of course, necessarily the only grievances in the Canadian Forces dealing with post-traumatic stress. We see them because there's a release involved or the quality of care is involved.
You may have a case, for example, of someone who has post-traumatic stress syndrome who is placed on constant probation for misbehaviour and claims that the reason for the misbehaviour is post-traumatic stress. We would not see that kind of grievance at our board, because that has to do with personnel administration; it doesn't have to do with release per se.
Out of the files that we've seen, there are two main points we would wish to make. In some of the cases there has been, we think, a requirement for financial compensation with respect to medical care. The chief has agreed with us, but unfortunately the chief has no financial authority. He has to send those kinds of cases off to a Justice lawyer who works in National Defence.
We think it would be a very good thing if the chief had the authority to give some kind of financial relief. This was recommended by Justice Lamer in 2003, when he did the five-year review of Bill C-25. Unfortunately it has still not happened.
This is something we would like to see. We think the Chief of the Defence Staff, as the final authority in the grievance process, should have the ability to bring finality to the grievance. In our view, he shouldn't have to write the griever to say, “We think you have a meritorious case, but unfortunately I don't have the authority to grant relief. I have to send it somewhere else.”
That's a point that has arisen from our review of these types of cases.
The other batch of cases that concerns us has to do with individuals who have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome and they then misbehave in some fashion. In one of the cases I looked at the individual had assaulted his spouse, and in another case there was excessive drinking. In these cases, from what I can see at least, the military focuses on the misbehaviour. They tend to look at whether the PTSD is a defence to criminal charge or whatever, and if it isn't, then the military basically releases the individual under an item called 5(f). A 5(f) is unsuitable for further service because of factors within one's control.
Another possible release item is 3(b), which is medical, being disabled. And 3(b) carries a host of benefits that a 5(f) release does not, including full severance pay, an immediate indexed pension if you have 10 years of service, vocational training, six months' notice and so forth.
We have seen a fairly rigid attitude so far.... I caution that we have not made recommendations to the chief in some of these cases, and he may well have a different view than some of his subordinates. But it seems to us that a more generous view might be that a medical release should not be dismissed out of hand simply because the individual has misbehaved. Of course the caveat I would put on this is that every case is different and this is highly contextual. But we want to make this point to the chief in some of these cases as we go along.
I think those are the two main points out of the cases we have seen so far. And some of the cases go back to the 1990s--Croatia, Bosnia and so forth.