Veterans Affairs committee  I disseminate a lot of the work that we do, such as today, and at conferences, and those sorts of things but I want it to be clear that, at the end of the day, I am there to help the decision-makers, the action-takers, and so I'm behind the scenes.

Veterans Affairs committee  Statistically, if you look in the annual report, the two main methods specifically for regular force males, I want to clarify, are hangings and firearms. Just so we're clear, that's consistent with what we see in the general population. The top two methods are the same both in the Canadian Armed Forces and in the general population.

Veterans Affairs committee  No, it's very rare, if not never the case, that individuals use their military-issue firearm. They use their personal firearms. That's something that is collected very rigorously.

Veterans Affairs committee  No, not at this point, and whether it's a lack of statistical power or if it's a true absence of a relationship is unclear at this point. As I said in my opening statement, you have to understand that “deployment” is a broad term. You can have two individuals with the same military occupation code technically doing the same job in the same location on the same deployment who have entirely different experiences, or when they come back, one is scarred, and one is not.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, chapter 1 of the annual suicide report.

Veterans Affairs committee  Sure, I can give you my copy that I have here, and it's also available on the web if you just search 2016 CAF suicide report.

Veterans Affairs committee  I don't know the specifics of the recruitment process. However, I do know that the 2009 expert panel explicitly stipulated that they were not interested in looking at screening out individuals for mental health reasons.

Veterans Affairs committee  Honestly, I don't know what the motivations are. You'd have to talk to the individuals who....

Veterans Affairs committee  I can't comment on that. The numbers are statistically quite small—

Veterans Affairs committee  —which is a good news story, I suppose, by itself.

Veterans Affairs committee  It's unlikely that we'll be able to do so with the annual suicide report. However, with the CF cancer and mortality study, the cohort is much larger and includes everyone who has ever worn a uniform since 1976, in essence. So the population is much larger, and we're not stopping looking at these individuals once they release; we're continuing to watch them, so the cohort is much larger.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, there's a balance that happens. We've been very transparent in that we look at each colour of uniform separately. We're not trying to hide what's happening by just looking at a general trend. The fact there are different things happening in the different arms of the Canadian Armed Forces is something the leadership takes very seriously.

Veterans Affairs committee  The MPTSR, the “Medical Professional Technical Suicide Review Report”, which is an investigation of every suicide—male, female, regular, or reserve—looks at access to care. The rates of access to care are quite high, so this opens a whole Pandora's box of the underlying mechanisms of access to care, which I think are multiple, and it could be a very long conversation.

Veterans Affairs committee  It's different. To be honest, I am at the end of the chain. I get the data once it's been dealt with by the individuals from the CSEA, the individuals who deal with deaths within the Canadian Armed Forces. The data is provided by them to the directorate of mental health. They are cross-referenced and confirmed by the directorate of mental health, and then they are passed on to us because we have the analytic expertise.

Veterans Affairs committee  In essence, if you followed the transition or how the annual reports have been progressing since 2008, there are two main trends that have appeared. The first is that the rate of suicide in the Canadian Armed Forces in general—here I'm talking about all types of uniform—is not statistically higher.