Yes, I sure do.
As you say, I'm still quite intimately involved with our wounded afterwards. For any one of them who comes into my area, I tend to become their personal physician, including Bill Kerr, who is our only triple amputee of the mission, and a number of other severely emotionally and physically wounded.
There are two important messages I want to pass on to your committee. The first is that every other nation in NATO, and I think by extension on earth, recognizes that the work we do with mental health is the best in the world. You have to be very careful when you talk about the disasters that happen in any system. There's a real danger when you are talking about people with PTSD who have fallen through the cracks—and there's no question some people have, that's inevitable in any large system. But there has to be some balance there, because the danger is that other people with the same problem will not seek the care. There are a tremendous number of resources out there and some very competent and caring people working in that field, but these people have to declare that they're having difficulty. That's a really important message we need to pass along. There has to be the balance in the reporting of how we manage PTSD that reflects that, and it can't just be the horror stories that are out there that, yes, we must address. There has to be the balance. Every other nation, including the United States, with vastly more resources, is looking at us to try to copy what we do in mental health.
As for the charter itself, I have offered a written submission about that, and I imagine the government feels quite bruised about this issue, with some fair justification. The charter was implemented to deal with a great number of veterans' concerns, and it did so pretty admirably. But the people working on the charter had been looking to the past, as they had been for 50 years. They had the great mass of aging veterans in mind and they served them well.
As I believe the committee is aware, my life has been somewhat chaotic recently, so it was only in the last few days that I was able to pull this presentation together. I realize now, as I hand out my written submission to you, that I've left out the key point I wanted to make. When the legislation was enacted, as I stated, it did a good job of addressing the needs of most veterans. But when the charter was written, no one could have anticipated how effective the Canadian Forces Health Services would be. Had the war in Afghanistan been fought 10 years earlier, we would have had three times as many fatalities and not nearly as many severely wounded individuals. But precisely because of the exceptional training our medics received, many soldiers who would have died in earlier conflicts are being dragged through the valley of the shadow. They survived, but they are horribly mangled, and there are more of them than anyone expected. For this small group, the charter's benefit restrictions can adversely affect their long-term health and welfare.
In my written submission I outlined why additional benefits might be considered for these individuals, but I omitted to mention that this compensation will lead to a great benefit for the government.
As a medical officer, I am a force multiplier. That means our soldiers fight harder when I'm around because they know they'll be well cared for when they get hit. All the combat team commanders I served with told me I had a great impact on morale. The reality is that you too can be force multipliers. To quote Napoleon, the morale of the troops is three times more important than their equipment. What you want from your armed forces is operational effectiveness. Back them up when they get hurt and you'll get a tenfold return on your investment.