Mr. Boissonneault, Mr. Marks, thank you both for being here. Thank you for your service and your counsel. You come to us at a time when our hearts and minds are with the people of Alberta, and specifically Fort McMurray. Our gratitude goes out to your colleagues in the field who are fighting the fires there and of course anywhere across the country.
You've given us some very sobering and disturbing numbers. If I'm right, you told us there were 45 suicides between last year and today, that up to 35% of your colleagues are potentially suffering from PTSD, and that more than half of your colleagues will not seek treatment. I think I'll use my time allotment and line of questioning to really bring out the human element of the issue that we're dealing with.
I'm wondering if you would take us into the fire hall and just give us a flavour of how the conversations are going, how things may have changed from 10 or 15 years ago. If you imagine a critical incident or a major deployment, how are your colleagues dealing with this afterwards? What kinds of resources are they immediately turning to in the short term, and what are they doing in the long term?