We have just released a DAOD, which is a departmental administrative order and directive, that talks about disabilities. We do have some folks with disabilities in the Canadian Armed Forces. Those are related mainly to how they learn, for example. Also, as you all know, if we have members who have been injured in operations—we've had quite a few who have successfully carried on, including people who have returned to active duty and to theatres of operations with prosthetic limbs and the like. Those are ways in which we do that, and we accommodate those types of individuals because, of course, there's value to doing that.
What we do have, however, is the concept that I've called universality of service. It is the aspect that gives us the right to not necessarily have the duty to accommodate in certain areas. The reason for that is that it's been proven in certain cases that there is a bona fide operational requirement for people to be able to do certain things.
For example, you need to be able to carry a load and to be mobile in order to help extricate somebody from a situation—it might be a burning vehicle, a damaged vehicle, a ship that's suffered something, an aircraft—and all of those things have been recognized by the courts to say that these are bona fide operational requirements. Somebody who showed up at a recruiting centre in a wheelchair, for example, would not be able to do those things. There's a recognition that the kind of duty that we perform is so demanding that you're going to be in combat at some point potentially in your career, and you need to be able to do these things because it's not only yourself at that point; it's also the rest of your team. We have been given that.
Universality of service calls upon you to maintain that capability throughout your career and to prove that you can. We sometimes make accommodations for folks who can't anymore, and those will be for a specific set period of time. That's either to get them ready to go back in if they can rehabilitate or, if they cannot, to enable them to do a proper transition. They then have the advantage of our transition group and that can be a process that can take up to six years depending on their desire to keep on working and whether or not we have a position for which, for example, we know they would not be required to go and deploy in an operational environment. We try to do that for as long as we can keep them.
In the cases of autism and everything else like that, folks have to pass a Canadian Forces aptitude test. It is a timed test that gives us an indication of the cognitive abilities of the individual, and their ability to learn. That's really what it comes down to because that's an important aspect. In a learning organization such as ours, people need to be able to understand and to comprehend complex weapons systems or procedures, so that we can then conduct operations.