National Defence Committee on June 5th, 2008

[MGen D.C. Tabbernor]

From 1991 to 1993, I commanded the Lake Superior Scottish Regiment in Thunder Bay, and I had the misfortune of having to receive the first reservist injured overseas on an operational tour back into my unit. I must tell you that at that time the system to deal with reservists injured overseas was abysmal.

The difference between now and then is stark. We have made huge gains in the area of care for our reservists. As General O'Brien has alluded to, reservists injured overseas are treated the same way as a regular force soldier. We look after them until they are prepared to go back to what they were doing before they went overseas.

I have read the report. I've read the 12 recommendations made by the ombudsman. I've read the Auditor General's report as well. I must tell you that some of the recommendations that have been made by the ombudsman are already being actioned by the military. The chief of the military personnel is the individual who deals with this area. They are already working towards putting in place policies or changes to address the concerns raised by the ombudsman in her report on reserve care.

Is it 100%? No. Are we making headway? Yes. Is it better than it was? Yes. Are we going to get better? Yes. Am I, in my position, comfortable that we are doing everything we can to look after the reservists? Yes. Are there reservists who fall through the cracks? Yes. When we find out about them, do we put in place steps to deal with them? The answer to that is yes as well.

However, there are those, both in the regular force and the reserves, who, when they get back from wherever they were, walk away from the military and disappear. Those we have trouble dealing with. And three, four, five, ten years down the line, this individual may resurface with an issue. In my experience, when those individuals have resurfaced and we've been made aware of them, we've taken steps to deal with them and have linked them up with the authorities responsible for looking after them. In most cases that is Veterans Affairs.

So it is dramatically better than it was, and it is getting better every day. There are still, as I said, some challenges, but we're dealing with them.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

I'm afraid that uses up the time. Hopefully, when it gets back to Mr. Bachand's turn, he will go back and get those answers he wants from the rest of you.

Ms. Black.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Thank you very much for coming and appearing at committee. I think you bring an important perspective for us to hear about reservists, particularly today when reserve soldiers are being called upon more and more to be in the mission in Afghanistan and to perform in a role that traditionally such a high percentage have not been called upon to do. So I think it's very important that we hear from you.

I have a reserve unit in my riding--the Royal Westminster Regiment--with a long and very proud tradition. Unfortunately, one of the soldiers from that regiment was killed last year in Afghanistan.

I also want to highlight the ombudsman's report, because in that report she makes 12 very serious recommendations. I know, General, that you said they are being actioned; I'm not 100% sure what that terminology means. Does it mean they've been implemented yet or that they're looking at implementing them?

The ombudsman interviewed 400 people for that report. The vast majority were reservists across the country who'd been injured, and it's really quite an explosive report about the lack of attention to the dramatic needs of many reservists. I think most Canadians, if they read it, and those who did, found it to be quite shocking. I know I did.

The investigation identified four major areas of concern, including significant inequalities in the provision of health care to injured reservists, and I understand and I know that while they're in the field--on the mission--they're treated in the same way as the regular forces. It's after that where the problems are.

The other issue that was highlighted in the report was that some reservists only received 40% of the amount that regular force members receive for dismemberment. I mean, the loss of an arm is the loss of an arm, and surely there can't be a differential in what that means to someone's life. So despite the fact that regular and reserve forces are exposed to the same risks, a number of the reservists don't have access to the same services, and I think that's still going on.

So of the 12 recommendations the ombudsman made, I wonder if you could be more specific about which ones are being actioned and what “actioned” actually means. For some of them, she gave a recommendation of a 12-month period where she felt they should be implemented.

The last thing I wanted to say was that even the director general of health services, Hilary Jaeger, said in the report, “No one is really 100 percent sure who gets what. Nobody really knows, including me, and I run the system.”

I hope you can help me with the recommendations, where they're at now and where they're going.

[MGen D.C. Tabbernor]

Luckily, I'm not a medical officer so I cannot really stray into the fields of the medical world.

The chief of military personnel, Major General Semianiw--who has been before this committee--is in the process of looking at each one of the 12 recommendations and looking at the policies we presently have in place that are impacted by those 12 recommendations. He is putting in place a plan to address the concerns raised by the ombudsman and to address the inequalities in her recommendations. So that is a work in progress.

As to where we are on addressing those concerns by the ombudsman in a timeline, I can't really tell you that because it is well within General Semianiw's area of responsibility. I am just a very interested observer, and my staff and I are there to assist General Semianiw in moving this along. But basically it's within his area of responsibility to deal with the response to the ombudsman.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

Could you clarify what you meant about being actioned? I really don't know what that term means.

[MGen D.C. Tabbernor]

Some of our personnel policies have not been re-examined in recent times. Commodore Blakely, who was Commodore Bennett's predecessor as COMNAVRES, commander of the naval reserve, has recently gone to work for General Semianiw to address all these personnel policies, to bring them up to date with today's realities with how we use both regular and reserve personnel, both in Canada and overseas.

Commodore Blakely will have a small staff who will work with him to address these policies and make them more current and more relevant to what we do today, so that, as an example, the differential in disability between—

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

That should be pretty straightforward. An arm is an arm, right?

[MGen D.C. Tabbernor]

It should be pretty straightforward. He's going to be looking at all these and working on them for General Semianiw. So work is in progress.

[Dawn Black, NDP, New Westminster—Coquitlam, BC]

One of the recommendations that dealt with the framework for the provision of medical and dental care, and another recommendation, talked about how medical records are kept for reservists. I would like to ask any of you to respond as to whether there have been—and I know it's only a couple of months since the report came out, but it seems to me it was so clear about the recommendations that need to happen and need to happen soon. Are any of you, or either of you, aware of any steps that have been taken to improve the medical record keeping?

[Cmdre J. Bennett]

Certainly in the case of the naval reserve and the navy, we are working on more effective record keeping, not only the actual documentation in the file but tracking where the records are, as our members do travel and are posted across Canada.

In addition, the larger Canadian Forces is going to move towards an electronic system, and we will be part of that in the implementation stage. So we're preparing our records to make sure they're up to date and they'll be ready for that transition.

[BGen E.B. Thuen]

From an air force perspective, the air reserve is significantly integrated into the regular force operations. We have very few stand-alone units like the army reserve has or the naval reserve has. Our people are employed in the air force. They don't train and deploy in the same manner as others. So we are, with three minor exceptions, part of the wings where we're based, and our medical records are kept by the wing as per the regular force personnel.

We don't have a lot of the same issues because we're not “remoted”. We have three small units of engineers in Gander, which is also a base, so they're looked after by the base there. We have a flight in Pictou, we have a flight in Bridgewater, and we have a flight in Aldergrove, British Columbia, and these flights are satellites of a wing and they're looked after by the wing.

How the wing keeps the medical records is the wing medical officer's purview, but all the reserves are treated by the wing as an A, B, or C class, depending on the class of service they're on.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Very good. Thank you.

Mr. Hawn.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you all for being here.

Over the last however many months we've been doing this, we've heard from a lot of people: soldiers, families. That has been in camera, so we can't share details, but suffice it to say we've heard a variety of stories, most of them critical, which is probably to be expected. Those are the kinds of stories that would be attracted to a committee like this. We've also heard stories of successes, challenges being met, and so on.

We've talked about the reserve care report, which had some pretty stark recommendations, as was mentioned. The Auditor General put out a report a few months before that, which had some recommendations but was also more complimentary. Now, of course, that was focused on the regular force, not the reserve force, so there's an obvious difference there, and that's where we come to today.

Again, as was pointed out, this report has only been out for two months, so it's probably a bit early to report on actual accomplishments. But I was encouraged to hear your statements, General Tabbernor, about your assessment of General Semianiw, who obviously is going to be taking it very seriously.

Is it safe to say, just with the way the regular force operates and the reserve force operates, that we'll probably—and this isn't to say it's right—always be playing a little bit of catch-up with the reserves relative to the way the regular force is treated in areas such as health care? Again, not justifying it, but is that a reality of some of the way we...?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Go ahead, General.

[MGen D.C. Tabbernor]

What we've been doing in the last couple of years is starting to focus people's minds on what's important. And what's important is the soldiers. Whether the soldier is a reservist or a regular force soldier, I think there is understanding and consent and agreement within the senior leadership in the Canadian Forces that we need to ensure our soldiers, generically, are looked after.

Even before the ombudsman's report came out, we were looking at and had put in place ways to improve the care provided to reserve soldiers when they come back from operations. So at the end of the day, once this is done, I would like to see, regardless of whether the individual is a reservist or a regular, that “if we break him, we fix him”. That quote is mine, out of the ombudsman's report.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

As a follow-up question to that, do you--or does anyone else--have a couple of good ideas on how to close the gap between the way the regular force is cared for and the way the reserve force is cared for at the moment?

[Cmdre J. Bennett]

Sir, if I could go back to your first question in the manner of answering your second, I don't think it's as much catch-up as it is adaptation. The reserves are being employed today, as all of you have noted, in a far greater capacity and in a very different range from the ways our policies were developed or the ways we've been deployed in the past.

There are differences between each of our environments as well, in the integration of the reserves into the environment. Some of us have reserve-specific tasks, roles, and missions. Others are fully integrated and are augmenting the regular force.

So again, I think there is an adaptation period required as we come up to speed with the greater use of the reserve force in the reality of today's Canadian Forces.

To answer your second question about good ideas, what has been a tremendous boost to us is the consultative approach and the consideration of the reserve as an integral part of the Canadian Forces, as opposed to an afterthought. It is most helpful to us in developing employment policies and spectrum of care to be involved at the outset. And that's what's happening in the action plan to address the ombudsman's report.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you.

You mentioned looking after the broken soldier, which is of primary importance.

When we talk about the regular force, we talk about the soldier being not just the person in uniform, but the family unit, because it's broken or fixed as a unit. There is a lot of emphasis in the regular force now on treating the soldier as a family unit. I'm assuming the answer will probably be yes, but I just want to confirm that the same philosophy is inculcated in the reserves as well.

[BGen G.J.P. O'Brien]

Certainly, in the army reserve the full sense of family is now involved, whether it's the regimental family or the individual family. There is a much greater inclusion in the pre-deployment and post-deployment interviews and processes that are involved.

The Military Family Resource Centres are expanding quite broadly to service reserve families and reserve communities. I think the culture within the army reserve, at least, is changing to include that broader view, not only of the regimental family, but of the families themselves.

I feel that's a very positive trend for us.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Going on to the operational stress injuries--PTSD, mental health--one of the challenges, of course, has been getting people to come forward and seek help. Is there a difference, in your experience, between a regular force person and a reserve person in terms of willingness to come forward that may stem from one's being part of the regimental family or being out in North Bay, away from the regiment?

Is the reservist more or less likely to come forward?

[BGen G.J.P. O'Brien]

I think the dynamic is exactly the same. I think post-traumatic stress syndrome affects every person the same way. I think the difference is the environment in which the person finds himself. A regular force member is often living within the base in his community and is much closer to the community, with large numbers of people around him who are thoroughly socialized to PTSD and will recognize those issues earlier than perhaps a reservist living in a town, working in a factory, where he's not near his fellow soldiers. So the issue for us is re-engaging the families and providing support to the families so the signs are recognized.

That's the basic difference between the two. I think they equally suffer in terms of the effects. I mean, traumatic experience is traumatic experience, no matter whether you're a reservist or a regular force soldier. The socialization and the pre-deployment training is exactly the same. They are as prepared as regular soldiers when they go into operations. The training they are now undertaking in terms of the mental preparation for the shock of battle, or the impact that traumatic experience will have on them, has gone a long way to improving the socialization of the concept. I think the issue of it being a stigma is leaving incredibly quickly, and I think that's coming from an honest care for our soldiers.

I think the only difference would be where the soldier happens to be when he does suffer some of the symptoms. He may not be in a place where people recognize it as quickly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

That ends the opening round. We'll go to a five-minute round now. We go over to the official opposition, back to the government, then over to the Bloc.

Mr. Rota.

[Anthony Rota, Liberal, Nipissing—Timiskaming, ON]

Actually, it's a question from Mr. McGuire.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Okay, Mr. McGuire.

[Joe McGuire, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Thank you.

I want to talk about the pension system between the reservist and the regular soldier. I understand the system is quite different for reservists, for obvious reasons, but if a soldier is disabled on duty, say in Afghanistan, the compensation is the same. I know we've heard in previous hearings where a soldier, whether reservist or not, can serve while on pension. There's a little sort of sideshow going on--I don't want to minimalize this or anything--of trying to get a higher pension than one may be eligible for. It's causing a bit of a problem with the medical services, taking up a lot of time, because they can actually draw a pension while they're serving.

Is this influencing the reserve side as much as the regular forces side? Do you have any kind of insight in that regard? I know there's some suggestion that maybe we shouldn't have a pension plan activated until the last year of service, or something like that, to eliminate a lot of the backlog that the medical corps has to deal with, apparently on a daily basis.