National Defence committee  We're here to preserve the manpower, which is really what the old mantra was.

National Defence committee  The other thing is that people will, as I say, determine what picture they want to paint. If they want to paint the picture that says they're ready to go and they have no problems here, they'll check that. We used to do the enhanced post-deployment screening before, because we wa

National Defence committee  Just off the top, I would say between 2% and 5%. There are those we screen out, and we tell them it's not in their best interest to go, for whatever reasons, such as a bad knee, for example.

National Defence committee  And we are company docs; we work for the company, but.... Therefore, at my level, I review the medicals done, because we don't want to send someone over who should not be over in Afghanistan—

National Defence committee  —and then have to be sent back and use resources that are there, which are our own resources, medical resources, and cause the mission to have to find a replacement and whatever. So we're not going to send somebody over there who is not....

National Defence committee  All I can add is that I think the forces are looking at...and this isn't a medical thing. Whether or not they keep it or whether or not they lengthen tours will be based on how many soldiers they have to meet the requirements. Again, it's positive and it's negative. I've heard

National Defence committee  My role, like Dave's, is to approve extensions of sick leave, which I say is absence from structured supervised activity. Basically, you allow people to stay home to get better. The trouble is that when people stay home to do whatever they want to do, their sleep patterns are def

National Defence committee  Exactly.

National Defence committee  In Edmonton there is a program I think where they're looking at spousal abuse, violence, that sort of thing. If someone wants to call and they don't want to bring in the MPs and the police, they're looking at some sort of a process that keeps the MP side out of it, which means th

National Defence committee  Do you mean some sort of official process set up by the military or the base, or whatever, in question?

National Defence committee  The problem with anything official is that it then becomes official. If you're talking about an unofficial blog that people sort of link into for their own self-help groups.... If you set it up as the base commander saying, “This will be the official line and here's how we're goi

National Defence committee  Again, it's out of my lane. I don't know.

National Defence committee  Even though we're now two and a half or three years out from when we actually started the deployments--and, again, those first complex injuries are just coming to the point where they're being released--we don't know how to allocate whether they were predominantly inside the wire

National Defence committee  That's out of my field.

National Defence committee  I can just add something to that. When I deployed, which was in 2004 for six months, I was taking blood pressure pills, which I take because I have hypertension. Some soldiers who are going over require medication for chronic conditions they have. That's presumably to make them