Thank you, Rear-Admiral Smith and Colonel Blais, for coming today.
I appreciate your opening comments and your statement that your top two priorities as chief of military personnel are the care of injured and wounded soldiers and the mental health of soldiers. Similar remarks were made by the minister, that that is his top priority. I appreciate that this is obviously of great importance to you.
It bothers me when I see reports like that issued yesterday by the military ombudsman, when specific things were identified in 2008, agreed to by the department, through the minister, and four years later.... I congratulate you and your predecessor—you weren't there for all that period—for meeting some of the objectives, four out of twelve of them. Others were partially implemented and two of them weren't at all.
One of them was particularly egregious. It seems to be more an administrative problem as opposed to a major effort being required, and that is making sure that reservists, for example, are entitled to the same accidental dismemberment benefits as regular soldiers.
There's a 60% differential, I think. Members of this committee four years ago were rather astounded at that and very angry about it. I would have thought that something like that could be a quick fix. Here we are four years later with nothing done about that.
There is another thing that bothers me, particularly when we are talking about mental health. I guess we know more today than we did in even 2008 about the onset of PTSD as something that may happen later, after a person is back from a deployment. The lack of regular medical checkups and attention to reservists after deployment seems to be a major gap and could in fact avoid detection and diagnosis of PTSD or OSI and thereby avoid treatment.
Could you address those two issues in particular?
I guess the third one, which is closely associated with that, is there are reports that reservists have been turned away from military medical clinics due to ignorance on somebody's part that they are actually entitled to the services.
Those are three issues I hope you can address.