I agree with you. I think that for a number of people their faith becomes shattered by these experiences. Other people come back deepened, deepened in a belief and commitment that what they were engaged in was of incredible value and that they made a significant difference. Others will come back having lost their sense of God. On that spectrum, it's pretty tough to know what might have caused that divergence of opinion. The important piece, from our perspective, is to meet them wherever they're at on that spectrum and to help them wrestle with the consequences and the questions involved in where they're at.
I've always said that for a chaplain the spiritual agenda is never ours. It is that of the soldier, the sailor, the airman, or the airwoman who we're dealing with, or the family member, and our job is to meet them where they're at and to journey with them on a spiritual journey that is properly their own, giving them all the support and resources we can to accomplish that.
Regarding the question of diversity, yes, we do have an Orthodox chaplain in the chaplaincy, and I believe we're recruiting another one this year. We have I think three Muslim chaplains at the moment; they're all Sunni. The Muslim member of the interfaith committee, which is a civilian credentialing committee that has a statement of understanding with the minister, is able to endorse Shiite Muslims as well, if one were to apply and be accepted for service.
Essentially, there are 11 members on that body, that interfaith committee, and collectively they represent some 60 different faith groups and denominations in Canada. That, according to the 2001 statistics from Statistics Canada, would represent about 74% of the Canadian population. There are groups that don't have representation there yet, but we have not had applications from those groups.
I don't know where the diversity will go in the future. We certainly have policies and protocols by which we would handle applications for endorsement and potential recruitment from other faith groups. I expect that some of that increasing diversity may manifest itself more quickly within our reserve communities than in the regular force, because we have a greater level of diversity in our reserve community as well.