Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Colonel Castro, thank you very much for being with us today. I should tell you at the outset that I am the daughter of a soldier who was in the front lines for six years. When my father came back, he had to be hospitalized for several months because people thought that he had gone mad. He died fighting for his rights. So I am very pleased to see that more effort is devoted to our soldiers coming back from active duty now than was the case in the 1950s.
You said that, instead of decompression, Canadian soldiers in Cyprus could benefit from the same training as is provided to Americans. You provide it before, during and after combat. Our soldiers, on the other hand, just receive training post-combat.
Do you think that the two other parts of the training are critical? I feel that the third part is not enough. A good number of young men and women coming back from Afghanistan suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder even though they have been through Cyprus.
Could they be helped by getting the other two parts of the training? Would it be easy to adapt the training so that we could provide it for our soldiers here?