Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Welcome to the committee once again.
Also, on behalf of my party, I wish you well in your future endeavours and in the choices you decide to make as you leave the Canadian Forces.
We've had a lot of testimony before this committee, some of which has been in camera. The testimony we heard in camera was very troubling testimony about mental health services and the lack of timely diagnosis or the lack of treatment that Canadian Forces members and their families felt they had a basic right to expect. The testimony was very striking in that the story each of the people who testified in camera told was almost identical. And there were several of them who told of their experiences.
At the same time, we've heard from people of higher rank within the military who clearly are committed to trying to treat mental health issues properly and effectively. They want to do that. But there seems to be this gap between what we're hearing from the upper echelons of the Canadian military and what we've heard from soldiers, not all of whom have been soldiers who returned from Afghanistan. Some were soldiers from our time in Bosnia. We even heard testimony about veterans from the Second World War who many, many decades later started to show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
My question to you is about this gap in perception and the gap between the testimony we heard from the individual soldiers and their families, who felt they didn't receive timely attention to their mental health issues, and the reports and testimony we heard about the desire in the higher levels of the military to ensure that they will. There is definitely this gap in the testimony we heard, and I'd ask you to address that.