National Defence committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. and members of Parliament. It is a pleasure to appear before you today to discuss how we care for the men and women of the Canadian Forces and their families if they are injured or become ill while serving. As you are aware, we've always had programs and s

National Defence committee  Certainly. In our experience in Afghanistan, there have been just over 2,000 casualities in total. Six hundred and twenty of those have actually been wounded in action, and about 1,400 of those injuries are non-battle injuries. The preponderance of casualties wounded in action a

National Defence committee  We have a program we put in place in the last two and a half years. It's called “The Road to Mental Readiness”, and that includes both a pre- and a post-deployment educational awareness strategizing piece for both the members and their families. Families play a key role in this r

National Defence committee  If a mental health condition were to be service related as a result of trauma experienced in a battlefield incident and not accompanied by a physical injury, that would certainly count in a wounded-in-action scenario. One of the priorities I have continued to strive for is to ha

National Defence committee  I am not well positioned to speak specifically to the reduction of casualties in terms of either the Chinooks or the Griffins that were deployed in theatre. I could take the question on notice. It would really be something that the folks in CEFCOM would have tracking stats on.

National Defence committee  Fine.

National Defence committee  Thanks for the question. The question is very timely. Just last Friday evening, Minister MacKay formally launched a Shoulder to Shoulder bereavement support program with members of the program--widows, families, fathers, and spouses of fallen members. One of the key attributes

National Defence committee  Absolutely. The Shoulder to Shoulder program is a national initiative that was born out of a wonderful initiative that started in the Edmonton area. It started out as something called the memorial cross network, when Edmonton was particularly hard hit back in 2006. Family member

National Defence committee  I would say I think we'd do even better than that. Every widow or surviving spouse has an assisting officer assigned to her to help her through all the immediate after-fatality administration, but that assisting officer at some point will disengage and go back to his or her prima

National Defence committee  I'm happy to come back to that later. The Minister of National Defence announced in March a new, complex transition period for people. Some of those people that you identified would have traditionally been released within about six months. Now we know that some of these people h

National Defence committee  The question of suicide is one that we pay particular attention to. Every time there's a death in the Canadian Forces, the announcement comes across my desk, and I always pause, particularly when a suicide comes across. They tend to hit me harder than others. I often wonder how t

National Defence committee  Great question. Since November of 2010 we have visited 22 bases across the country on exactly that, an outreach piece with Veterans Affairs, which I've ultimately hosted on each base with the senior personnel, my counterparts from Veterans Affairs, to do exactly that, get the w

National Defence committee  That's a great question. I'm going to ask General Bigelow to comment in a moment, but I will say that there has been an outpouring in the last 10 years. And we could have a debate about that, but it's probably been since the start of the Afghanistan mission. In my view, Canadians

National Defence committee  I would submit that the greatest thing we have done in the last three years is to stand up the joint personnel support unit. Notwithstanding that all leaders in the Canadian Forces are trained from day one to look after their troops, the reality is that the business of force gene

National Defence committee  Obviously they may not have put their hand up previously, but now they're increasingly inclined to put their hand up. The same thing applies six, eight, or thirty months downstream if they put their hand up and say they think they have a problem. They're given the same confidenti