Thank you very much, Chair.
Surgeon General, it's wonderful to have you back with us.
I'd like to begin first by paying tribute to you and all of your colleagues in the Canadian Forces Medical Service.
From personal experience, from everything we have heard on this committee, and from everything we have all read, I honestly think that one of the untold stories of valour and achievement for Canada in the Afghanistan mission has to do with your service—your service in the plural—in that Role 3 hospital and all across the board within ISAF, within the Canadian contingent.
You have our unreserved thanks—I think from all members of this committee—for that unbelievably brave and professional work. There's a long tradition of this in the Canadian Forces.
I think of Sir Frederick Banting, whose name is now on Colonel Tien's chair of research, where he's trying to be a bridge for some of the experience of Kandahar, to bring it in to clinical trials and application in civilian life. We'll hear more about that later we hope in these hearings.
I think of Private Richard Thompson—not known to that many people—from the South African War, who won the very highest honour, even higher than the Victoria Cross, the Queen's Scarf, for bravery there as a stretcher-bearer.
I also think of a visit this weekend to Mr. Opitz's riding, where a Victoria Cross winner lies in a cemetery near where we had a Remembrance Day ceremony. Corporal Frederick George Topham, who was literally a medical orderly but who showed enormous bravery on the east side of the Rhine in March 1945.
You are at the front line often and your work is absolutely central to morale and to what the Canadian Forces set out to achieve.
Given that we still have troops in training roles in Afghanistan in harm's way, could you lay out for the committee what would happen to a Canadian soldier were they to be injured today in Kabul, in Mazar-e-Sharif, or at some other place of deployment? Take us through the stages of treatment that soldier would undergo—some Canadian, obviously, and some international—and then the forms of support that would be available in Canada for a person with a serious injury. Could you describe in general terms how that service, that process, has changed now compared to 10 years ago?