Thank you.
I just want to acknowledge the tremendous steps you've made going forward in rebuilding the military health delivery system. We know there was quite a deficit overcome. Increasing the number of mental health professionals—I believe you just mentioned that 218 was the number—is a proactive step, as are pre- and post-deployment training and screening for mental health issues. I also want to acknowledge the aggressive stance you've taken on the mental health education campaign for both men and women.
Decompression wasn't mentioned on that list, but I think the decompression time the soldiers have coming back is tremendously valuable.
I want to just go back to the question of sleep deprivation, and we addressed this earlier, but there is a notion that something has changed with our soldiers recently, in the sense that they have time zone issues and they have the stress of combat. I know even for members here, we get out of our intense little combat zone here at the House, as it's sometimes described, and we need some time to just sort of chill out in the evening when we get home, and we have various ways of doing that, I suppose.
I noticed that a lot of the soldiers carry electronic gadgets with them, which is something new in this era, and they spend a lot of time on computers or computer games, but their sleep is a challenge. This came up when we were in Valcartier visiting your base surgeon there, Chantal...I forget the rest of her name. In fact, when they're doing sleep therapy sessions with the soldiers, they find there's tremendous improvement in some of the soldiers who were manifesting what might have been diagnosed as post-traumatic stress or operational stress injuries.
I'm just wondering, sir, whether that's something that is on your radar. I mention it to you because we've discussed it with your medical officers. Is that something on your radar, and is it perhaps something we could look into, helping our soldiers get sleep? I'm not talking about drugs, but just dealing with the fact that they need rest. That's an important part of maintaining mental health.