Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, exactly. We have had some problems because of human rights. However, most people agree voluntarily. If we're going to send someone to Africa for nine months, we want to meet the guy's wife, because she will have to help him. Most people agree to that, and we want to see how they react to stress.

Veterans Affairs committee  Let me explain. Suppose we are carrying out a mission in Jordan, where we are training police officers. The profile required for the mission in Jordan is the following: we need Canadian Forces members or police officers with extensive experience. They don't have guns and they do not interact with the people.

Veterans Affairs committee  Well, I looked on the National Defence website and I don't believe they do psychological assessments. They may establish a profile, but I don't know. So I can't answer that.

Veterans Affairs committee  I really can't say. To do the training, you need discipline—the weak ones break down under the strain—but there is no psychological assessment. We recommend that both the member and his or her family be subject to psychological testing. Who is going to support the guy when he comes back?

Veterans Affairs committee  The problem is that there are two schools of thought. My area of specialization is medical surveillance. When you work at the Royal Canadian Mint, you have to work with gold, arsenic, lead and mercury. When I do urine tests for screening purposes, I find traces of those metals: that's a fact.

Veterans Affairs committee  Until recently, all the police forces were under the responsibility of the RCMP. We still take police from all municipal police forces. This is paid for by CIDA. And yes, they have the same program. When they return, if the psychological assessment of the force is oui, we send them.

Veterans Affairs committee  No, I was trying to…

Veterans Affairs committee  And I fully agree, because they got stronger with that stress, and we put them in front of the action. I agree with you.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's a good point, and it's always difficult to assess. Each military detachment has its own medical, but how much psychological support is there? That's why we have the employee assistance program, where I see George if he's ill. So there is a way, and we enable that. In our mission, we have a police force detachment, and we have an employee assistance program that detects the guy who thinks he's too good, etc., and like Mother Theresa, he wants to say too much and he's doing too much.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's a good question. Once you're back from a mission, you have a repatriation medical assessment. In the force I was in, the RCMP, we did psychological screening. The tests were done early, before deployment. If upon return there were some changes the member did not notice, we had an early intervention.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, and in fact it's up to the employer, the force and the RCMP, to select the right person. You wouldn't argue that to drive an emergency vehicle with a red light on top identifying you as a police officer, you can't see. So we don't argue about that. Psychologically, in regard to pre-trauma, that's where we have to screen out people.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, absolutely. We don't want these cases to end up in confrontation. There are established facts. Certain things make me feel uneasy. I can talk about the RCMP. In stress-related cases, they tell us we shouldn't talk about it. But that is not the way we do things. As occupational physicians, when it is determined that an individual is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and that means he is eligible for compensation, we consider him to be eligible and we pass on the file.

Veterans Affairs committee  From what I can see, they don't do a psychological profile. However, when the RCMP deployed its 2,000 members, it did do a psychological profile of them. We did a psychological assessment and post-trauma debriefing to get a clear understanding of how these people experience stress.

Veterans Affairs committee  That would be a good idea. In terms of our deployments, the medical team, which included a chief psychologist, a physician, and a security supervisor, would make annual visits to see all the soldiers. We also know that when these visits occur, soldiers have a tendency not to ask for a consultation.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's a good question. Soldiers have a medical profile. We try to determine, for example, whether they have good eyesight—