Thank you, Mr. Chair, and I thank my colleagues for this opportunity.
I want to address my questions to Ms. Burke, to deal with the mental health aspect here. I think at the same time that the Veterans Affairs committee was looking at PTSD, we were doing a study at National Defence on quality of life focusing on PTSD, and there were a number of revealing things that came out of that. I was glad to hear you mention the families because a lot of the witnesses who came with us came with a family member for support, and there were all varying degrees of stress or trauma from quite mild to very severe.
Some of the things that came forward were that if you were in the regular force and you were close to where your unit was stationed, you had more opportunity for treatment. If you were reserves and you were far away from where your unit or any of your colleagues was, it became harder to get service. There is an urban-rural split, it seemed, just generally; you mentioned that in Canada alone, just the general population, getting help for mental health issues.
So I certainly hope that some of these issues have been addressed. Maybe you can address that, and the fact that PTSD sometimes is not apparent for quite a while, and then the addictions and the instability in the family and the inability to work and cope with people around you start to appear. So you may leave the forces and you may sign something to say you feel good, you're young, you're ten feet tall and bulletproof, nothing is going to bother you, and then months later you collapse.
So I'd like you to talk a bit about what has been put in place—maybe not so much with the Veterans Charter, but try to relate it to that if you can—for these types of folks.