Just to complement what my colleague here said, we are recognized, within NATO, within the armed forces, as the “stigma busters”. I will go to a NATO meeting and people will say, “Well, in Canada, you guys have that sorted out.”
It's not as perfect as that, but it asks the exact same questions of British soldiers, U.S. soldiers, and Australians. Our stigma--the perception of people being weak, this kind of thing--is about a third of the other nations'.
So the campaigns--OSISS, “Be the Difference”, all of these things--have been working. In fact, we asked 2,500 soldiers in one block, one year, “Would you think less of somebody else who was receiving mental health care?” and only seven percent of them said yes. So we've come way ahead. In my career, there was a stigma against mental health professionals when I started, never mind patients.
It's not done. We're not done. But I think we need to look at other barriers to care as well. There are structural barriers like geography. You can take down all the stigma in the world and you're not going to make the country smaller.
So I think we'll never lose sight of that stigma and that culture, because as soon as you look away, it's going to rear its ugly head again. People like Bill Wilkerson in the economic round table point and say, “If the Canadian Forces can do this, why can't Ford, or why can't these other large companies?”