Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for appearing today.
I want to come back to something that I think is the dominating issue here, which is mental health care services. I am going to summarize the concerns I have and ask some specific questions, because I really don't think we have some answers to this point.
We know from the questions and the report of the Auditor General that we don't have firm numbers on how many of those serving in our armed forces are receiving care for mental health disorders. Brigadier General Jaeger said that you may have the data in a couple of years' time. That concerns me, and I want to come back to that in a second.
We also know we can't meet the demand. When soldiers come back from theatres of operation to Canada, we simply can't meet all the demands for mental health care services.
If we flip the number you gave us before, instead of saying 75% are dissatisfied, we know that in 2002 only 25% were satisfied. That was some time ago. You say there are changes. There hasn't yet been a survey to assess the current status. The only answer to that was “maybe in a couple of years' time”.
We have a critical decision to make as to whether we will extend the mission in Afghanistan. The government wants to do that. Yet we were told that we have no firm grasp on the status of mental health care for our armed services in a theatre that is putting our soldiers in a very difficult and mentally stressful situation. This has generated a lot of questions for Canadians.
Let me come back to this. Instead of saying that maybe in a couple of years' time you'll have that data, specifically what are you doing to ensure that we will get that data, and what date will we have it by?
I am starting with the simplest question. How many of our armed forces are actually receiving care for mental health disorders today?