Thanks for the question.
I'd first like to just address the suicide rate issue.
Every single one of the suicides is a huge tragedy for us because they're our family members in uniform. It's a very different society, very tightly integrated, so every CF member is a brother and sister. And it affects the medics as well as everybody else. So it's a very serious problem for us to address.
However, we continue despite these years of war.... We expected an increased rate. We've always expected an increased rate because of the stresses of operations. We haven't seen it happen yet. We still remain roughly 20% below the national average for the age and sex-adjusted rate.
We had 19 male suicides last year. Suicides are such a rare occurrence, happily—even though every single one is a tragedy—that statistically, epidemiologically, we need to eliminate chance as the cause of a spike in a rate. So we've been following carefully suicide rates since 1995.
We have to block them in five-year blocks to get an adequate numerator of suicides, in order to get a statistically significant outcome for a suicide rate. The 19 for last year are in the first year of the next five-year block. It is possible that it's the indication of an upward trend as a result of operations in Afghanistan. However, even if we had five years of 19 males, or a total of 20, it would still remain below the national rate.
The rate since 1995, if anything, has decreased, but it's remained the same. We've carefully analyzed, for any link to deployment, every single suicide since last year. We examine very carefully with psychiatric expertise. We essentially do a psychological audit of each individual suicide. So far, there is no specific trend; there is no link specifically to deployment. Up until last year, the majority of our suicides were people who had never deployed before.
So we're not sure, but we're cautious, because we've anticipated an increased rate. We can't yet determine that it's an increase. Statistically that would be irresponsible of us to state at this point. We could not scientifically state that there is an increase at this rate because the numbers are so low.
With respect to the transition to civilian life of soldiers who require ongoing care, last year the defence minister announced an integrated transition plan to be applied to every soldier being released for medical reasons. That provides us up to three years of transition time, not only to get their medical care in place with the provinces and with additional services provided by Veterans Affairs, but also vocational, social, and any other element that would help set them up for a successful transition to civilian life.
We'll never be perfect because there is a national shortfall in medical care, specifically in certain health professions across the country. Constitutionally, our society has decided that the armed forces are there to conduct military operations, and the other institutions—the provinces and the provincial health systems, supplemented by care from Veterans Affairs—are there to provide care to people after they've released from the armed forces.
We do continue, for example, our specialized mental health clinics, operational trauma and stress support centres, and the 10 Veterans Affairs operational stress injury clinics. We have a memorandum of understanding where we can continue caring for each other's patients even after release. So we can care for veterans, if it's convenient logistically and otherwise, and they can care for serving Canadian Forces members as well where it's convenient. We take advantage of that, but we still do have challenges that are not unique to the Canadian Forces but that affect all of the Canadian population.