Thank you for your question regarding families. In the military, a family's a team. My wife didn't choose me because I was in the military; she chose me, and I was in the military. She had to live with the consequences of that.
I was deployed to Afghanistan for nine months while she was home pregnant raising a three-year-old and a one-year-old, and that winter, in Quebec City, they got 4.5 metres of snow. It was a lot harder for her than for me during those nine months. Then we were transferred to Ottawa and Washington. My wife had to learn English and find jobs working in English. My children had to learn English. Also, one of the reasons I left the forces was that I had four children, and travel and transfers were getting hard on them.
The least we can do is offer families services in their language. That means going through family centres, which are a very good initiative. As Ms. Chouinard said, you have to tell them where these services are.
According to some of the testimony I've heard, some families have trouble adapting. I saw it in Valcartier where anglophone families who were moving to Shannon or Valcartier were having a hard time. As a supervisor, when a subordinate was having problems at home, I felt it, and I had to help. If we can't help when it's the family having issues, then it might be better to send them somewhere else. Families are really a team, and we have to help them. We need spouses. To a certain extent, we also need to help the children go through that. For many families, and I went through this, when kids are 9 years old or 10 years old, they don't want to leave their friends, they don't want to have to build a new life, they don't necessarily want to have to study in another language. These people leave, and that has an impact on the effectiveness of the military.