Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, General Dallaire.
I want to pick up on this professional help, because obviously this is the answer to getting people back on their feet and functioning well. You say that it's not the remuneration that is the problem with getting psychologists and psychiatrists. It seemed to me that in your list of things, the one that struck me was this business that the diagnosis or the treatment plan of such a professional might be overruled by the command structure, and you referred to that again in your most recent comments.
It would seem to me that if we could get rid of that, I think we'd get a lot more psychiatrists from the general community as well as within the armed forces, because these professionals don't necessarily have this vocation to serve in the Canadian Forces. They have a vocation that is elsewhere. It is to heal the mind and spirit of the patients who come to them, and to restore them to a state of responsible self-determination and health and ability to move forward.
So what we have here is a conflict between the vocation of a mental health professional and the culture of the armed forces, which tends towards conformity, obedience, brotherhood, and honour defined in a certain way. My guess is that a mental health professional might define “honour” quite differently from a military professional.
So how you bridge that gap, to me, would only be if we could get these external people to have freedom of treatment, not interfered with by the command structure. What do you think of that?