First of all, Mr. Hawn, thank you for mentioning those three fine young soldiers. I had the opportunity to spend Saturday night at a gala ball for the Military Families Fund in Calgary with Master Corporal Paul Franklin, his wife Audra, and his mother-in-law.
I've also had the chance to see Will Salikin, incredible young man that he is, and Corporal Jeffrey Bailey, massive young man that he is, many times since they were wounded. We had almost given up hope that those last two young men were actually going to be with us today, and we view this as a real miracle.
Paul Franklin is my personal hero. Every day when I get out of bed and hobble around my room with my creaking bones and aching muscles, whining and whinging about it, I stop, shut up, and think about Paul Franklin and what he goes through to live the life he's living.
We have had a revolution in how we look at the military family. We're going against hundreds of years of British army tradition that became Canadian army tradition. I jokingly tell audiences that we used to have the saying in the army, “If the army had wanted you to have a family, they would have issued you one.” That's how we treated people. That was the attitude we had. We have changed that attitude significantly. The Military Families Fund gala in Calgary on Saturday night, where 550 Canadians came out to pay tribute, is just one indicator that the change is starting to take root.
We include the family in all we do. We include the family in briefings, preparations, and discussions of the missions that we're going on. We have a deployment support centre at every major base or unit, and they have reached out to those families in a way that we had never even contemplated when we were doing operations back in the nineties and eighties and seventies.
We have brought them in to make sure they always know what's going on, and we support them in a variety of ways. We help prepare those families—we don't necessarily do it very well, but we're working at it—to help in the reintegration when their loved one comes home from mission. Sometimes there might be some problems, but in the majority of cases, no. We help them to be able to reintegrate their family and carry on with their normal family life. We have done that in a whole variety of ways. We have the chain of command and the family structure on side.
What we've also had to do, though—and I do this personally—is tap the families on the shoulder once in a while and say, “Okay, this can't be all us.” I went to Edmonton and sat down with 12 wives in the MFRC. The husbands of nine wives had just come home after six months and the husbands of three of the wives were still there for the nine-month tour. I said, “How many of you have used the services here at MFRC?” Several of them said they hadn't at all. Several said they didn't know anything about the services. And there were a variety of other comments. I said, “How many actually attended the briefings that were going on?” Actually, very few of them had attended at that stage.
We've changed that dynamic. But still, there is a responsibility on the wife, the husband, and the family. When we give them the invitation and say, “We're going to walk through this and we're going to talk to the challenges”, they have a responsibility to meet us halfway. That's the other side of the coin. We're working with families every day to do that.
We have actually changed how the MFRC supports our families. There was a successful coming together of the leaders of the MFRCs in Toronto on the 23rd and 24th of May. And I had an opportunity to walk through where we need to change, where we need to put the emphasis and resources, and how we can do things better. We don't want to be just a silo in Petawawa. We want to take lessons from Halifax, Bagotville, and Edmonton.
We've had some incredibly positive feedback. I was in Edmonton. On Sunday afternoon, I flew directly there from the Calgary ball the night before, and I had the opportunity to visit with two soldiers, both of whom had recently returned. One was Private Anthony Price, a 22-year-old soldier who was wounded in the arm and shoulder. What an incredible young man. He has all the support he needs and is well on his way to recovery. He cannot wait to go back to the mission, and he wants to go back before his rotation is finished. So that's our goal with him, to let him do that.
The second guy was Major Mark Campbell. He was there with his wife Donna, who is a warrant officer in the Canadian Forces. Also present were his 9-year-old daughter Meaghan and his son, Steven, 12 years old. Just sitting and talking with that family for an hour, I could tell that they have the support they need. They feel like they're wrapped in our arms, and our arms are your arms, all the way around here, because you are the political leaders of our country, and that means a lot to them.
So we've made some progress. We've made some dramatic progress. Do we still have a long way to go? Yes, we do.