National Defence committee  Yes, sir, I can't say I have a huge experience of having seen effective, coordinated planning occurring between civilian and military populations. It happens often at a level above me, but when we get onto the ground the execution still is lacking, so the more we can teach that a

National Defence committee  An emphasis on recognizing that there are many tools needed to bring peace and stability to a country, not just civilian, not just military, not just police...the more people recognize that the better off we will be.

National Defence committee  I would say we're well past that, sir. Our first reach out is often to the non-governmental organizations that are first on the ground, that have often been there for decades before we've come in, that know the population, that know the flows and rhythms, and they allow us to get

National Defence committee  We run hazardous environment training for Government of Canada members, primarily GAC members who are deploying to dangerous theatres.

National Defence committee  The Peace Support Training Centre started as a centre for niche capabilities, and we would send ones or twos off to missions. We grew the mandate of our mission so they're assisting with our training mandate overall. When I went to Afghanistan, for example, because I was deployed

National Defence committee  In my personal experience, when I was in Haiti I worked very closely with Canadian police officers: RCMP, provincial, municipal and whatnot. Our jobs, roles and mandates were significantly different. There's certainly an element of commonality, but we can't equate it to the same

National Defence committee  We currently conduct regular domestic operations exercises, and at the provincial level we're getting better about integrating all first responders and bringing them together, along with, in some cases, municipal and provincial political figures. We're doing that here at home, do

National Defence committee  I think there is, but my understanding is that we were primarily training a lot of international students. There would be value in training a Canadian military member on how to work with a Ghanaian police officer, but it is a bit esoteric and abstract unless you have a particular

National Defence committee  It's been a huge shift, as you know, over 75 years. To talk about where we're going, we've gone from missions where we have a mandate to maintain peace, to missions where there may not be an element of peace to maintain. We're going more and more into countries where most of the

National Defence committee  I should probably clarify, before I pass it to Colonel Allain, that we have air force and navy personnel in the Peace Support Training Centre, so we provide this training on behalf of the entire Canadian Armed Forces. It is nestled within the army, so there's an army flavour to i

National Defence committee  Yes, sir, normally it would be the odd pilot, air crew or support personnel who might not be army who participate as well. What we will be doing is providing some of the contracted cultural awareness training. The army still remains responsible for child soldier doctrine. We wi

National Defence committee  We've made great strides in our mental health care for our forces and we're trying to emphasize the preparation before people deploy. Our road to mental readiness program has become quite well developed. We have several other programs in the army. We have Mission: Ready, which lo

National Defence committee  No, sir. We have not developed anything specific to peacekeeping so far. We will be talking with the first rotation when they come back to find out if there are specific things they're seeing that we need to tailor into our programs.

National Defence committee  I have spoken with the commanding officer over there. To date, they've had no exposure to child soldiers. Most of the troops outside the wire are flying and moving around. They're not on the ground with patrols, so they have not seen that as a huge concern and they felt that the

National Defence committee  Yes, sir. It's what the individual soldier needs to know in the country to survive and thrive.