Thank you, Chair, and thank you to both of you for coming and joining us.
Lieutenant-Colonel Heber, I was very impressed by your resumé and your journey from being a nurse to being a psychiatrist to and being a lieutenant colonel in the military, and your deployments.
I liked your description of what goes on here in Ottawa. I have no doubt that, with the 35 staff and the flagship operation, you can do very good work. One of the worries I have though is that if you have a flagship, of course, everybody wants to compare it other things.
You mentioned a special program in Petawawa from 2007 to 2009. I'm sure you're aware of the report that was done by civilian clinicians in April 2012, only a year ago, which outlined what was being done in 2007 and 2009, and we assume it was top of the line. There were serious problems at this point with complaints that the OTSSC program was under-resourced; that they didn't have a medical addictions specialist, although 60% of the caseload were addictions related; that the wait times were unreasonable if you had a psychiatric diagnosis and needed somebody else; that the salaries weren't competitive with similar positions outside; and that there was no incentive for people to come live there. You're probably aware of the litany of what happened.
We've been told that improvements have been made. We don't have all the chapter and verse on that. But what I want to know is, how can this happen? If you did set this up—I'm not doubting that—and if you have a capability like we have here in Ottawa, how can that happen in Petawawa where we have so many soldiers, so many returning soldiers, and a huge complement of people? Why not have the kind of services available to this group of soldiers as are available here in Ottawa at the same standard?