Quebec has done wonderful things in terms of reducing its suicide rate, which was once one of the very high ones within Canada. Not everything is being done in our centre of excellence, but overall within our health services and within the CAF, we definitely do have programs such as peer support. The sentinel program itself is developing more and more in the army, training peers to reach out and get each other. The operational stress injury social support, OSISS, has been around since the early 2000s. We recognize that.
Within our road to mental readiness, we are teaching people to look for the signs within themselves when they're recruits. As they become older and have more experience, they start to become a bit responsible for other people around them, so they detect difficulties. We have leadership training specifically for leaders as well. For leaders, we talk about authentic, genuine leadership, knowing your people day to day, having coffee or tea with them, getting to know them and then you'll notice the subtle changes. You're not going to notice the subtle changes if you don't know them well.
That has been part of our prevailing access. With our road to mental readiness, we've just developed specific gatekeeper training for military police—for example, how they will deal with people if they encounter them when they're struggling.
You're 100% right. There's a clinical piece and a non-clinical piece. One helps people in crisis but also may get them into care. So we're very mindful of that and we have multiple programs.
With our last expert panel, we had a lot of civilians from all over. Absolutely, any lessons learned or anywhere there's some evidence, we will apply it.
I'm going to defer answering on what Veterans Affairs is doing as I'm not involved in direct implementation of things, but we have the things in place.