We've always had first responders as part of what we talk about with CIMVHR and at our conference we always have presentations on first responder research as well. It's definitely something that's in our sights and always has been. In fact, a lot of the researchers doing research on military and veterans populations are also doing research on first responder populations. It's the same people that we see doing the work, because they are experts in their area of research and they can focus in on a particular population.
Where we ran into a bit of a hiccup, though, was on the more political side of things. First responders don't see themselves as military and veterans, and military and veterans don't see themselves as first responders. They understand there is an overlap, but they don't see it as exactly parallel.
Have we built a mechanism that works extremely well? Yes, we really have. We've networked the universities and we have the research being done. For example, three years after we started, research on post-traumatic stress in Canadian veterans had increased by 400% over any other period of time since World War II. We know we're having that kind of effect by focusing on a specific population, and we've built a very effective mechanism.
However, what I realized at the meeting in January is that there are a lot of stakeholder groups for public safety who probably need a say in how a research institute moves forward for them. We're happy to share. If an institute were to start, we'd be happy to share whatever we have. If the public safety department decided they wanted their own, they could use our governance structure, our conference, our journal. Anything like that we're happy to share.
I did get the impression—Monsieur Picard will correct me if I'm wrong—that the groups there felt they needed their own institute focused on this, as we were focused on military and veterans health.