:
Mr. Casson, ladies and gentlemen, thank you.
First of all, let me say that I'm glad to appear before the committee today.
As CDS, one of my most important responsibilities is to ensure that we have a Canadian Forces that cares holistically for our men and women. That care includes making sure we have the right leadership at every level, that we have the right equipment when we ask those men and women to do a job for us, that they are appropriately trained, that they have the right benefits to compensate them for the job they do for us, that they are physically prepared for the jobs they have to do, and that they are looked after, prepared, sustained, and supported medically and dentally, and certainly that includes their mental health. It is a responsibility that I take seriously and that I know the leadership of the Canadian Forces also takes seriously. It wouldn't even require me on top of them to make sure they do, because they do.
I appreciate and welcome the committee's interest in this regard. We welcome your leadership in this specific field, because I believe the Canadian Forces have gone through some tough times. We almost broke the Canadian Forces, as a country, and within that, we almost broke the medical system. Therefore, much of what we have been doing for a long period now is simply trying to recover, to get out of that deficit and get us to a solid base where we can do our job in the way that we want to do it.
[Translation]
Thank you for your continued support to the men and women of the Canadian Forces.
[English]
To better appreciate where we are—and I know you've been through much of it with respect to our health care generally and mental health care specifically—I think it's key to understand where we have been.
With the end of the Cold War, the anticipated peace dividend led to our downsizing, including the CF health systems and health services, exactly as our commitments operationally worldwide in intense operations skyrocketed, with operations in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Somalia, Rwanda, Cyprus, and others. We now continue to see, perhaps in increasing numbers, casualties from those operations who for the first time have felt confident enough to come forward.
[Translation]
The result was a dramatic reduction of military health care capacity, retaining only those services deemed necessary for future operations. A decision was taken to downsize in-garrison care in Canada and leverage the civilian health care system; a decision that ultimately did not serve the needs of a modern day fighting force.
[English]
We closed in-patient capabilities in Ottawa, Valcartier, Halifax, Esquimalt, and Germany, all with in-patient psychiatric capacity. In-patient addiction rehabilitation services were closed in Valcartier, Kingston, Winnipeg, Esquimalt, and of course Germany, as we did the pullout from there.
[Translation]
At the same time, the civilian health care sector was under severe financial pressures. It could not easily accommodate the additional Canadian Forces patients with unique occupational requirements.
[English]
By the late 1990s we knew, and it was confirmed by a chief review services report, that our military health care system was in trouble. We had almost destroyed it. As a result, we launched a health care project entitled “Rx2000”.
Rx2000 was our health care reform initiative—and I know you've heard about it—which would touch every aspect of health care delivery in Canada and on operations abroad. We addressed a host of issues with Rx2000: primary care; mental health services; health protection and promotion; attraction, retention, and training of health care personnel, which was a major challenge; and other issues such as electronic health records.
Part of Rx2000 included a comprehensive review of mental health best practices using an evidence-based approach. This led to a multidisciplinary mental health care delivery model, since validated by a third-party evaluator and the OAG.
Redeveloping lost capabilities is difficult and it takes a long time. We know when we lose unique capabilities it will require years, and for us, sometimes decades, to regrow that. I think there are lessons there for the future.
Rx2000 started to correct many of the deficiencies we identified in the late 1990s but did not address all of the current realities. It truly was a survival mode.
What has transpired since then?
[Translation]
The Canadian Forces have continued to adopt a proactive stance in addressing the health needs resulting from contemporary conflict. Further enhancements are being made to the Canadian Forces health care system. We are hiring more health care providers at clinics across Canada to further enhance the primary care provided there. We are expanding the case manager program to better support members with complex health care issues and we are expanding our mental health services.
[English]
By the end of this fiscal year we will have hired an additional 218 mental health professionals--psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, mental health nurses, pastoral counsellors, and addiction counsellors, just to name some of them. Our CF team will have almost 450 mental health professionals.
[Translation]
The Canadian Forces mental health team uses an interdisciplinary model that involves comprehensive and holistic mental health assessment and tailored treatment that meets the individual's unique needs.
[English]
Where problems result in treatment not being available in the CF in a timely manner, personnel are referred to the outside civilian health care providers.
[Translation]
It is important to recognize that the Canadian Forces are unique in their use of civilian mental health providers.
[English]
The CF funds appropriate and necessary care without the member incurring payment charges.
[Translation]
The treatment can be as long as necessary, provided that the therapy is evidence-based and follows best practice guidelines.
[English]
This approach is at the leading edge of mental health care in Canada. We also realize that the social environment can enable care and recovery from mental health problems in the way it addresses the stigma that has been too often associated with mental health issues.
We've all been there. We realize what a challenge it was. The result was a program of social support for members and families: the operational stress injury social support program, launched in 2001. With some success, this program has grown into a robust partnership--we believe a strong partnership--between us and Veterans Affairs Canada, with 40 employees and some 120 volunteers across the country. We've assisted more than 3,500 clients, including more than 100 families. It offers one-on-one support, peer support groups for serving military personnel, veterans, and families, and social support to bereaved families.
This innovative program has been enhanced by a new educational campaign for our people, our men and women. This campaign was developed by a group, including veterans who have recovered from mental health problems, clinicians, the U.S. Marine Corps, and Canadian academia, and it will help us increase general awareness of mental health, provide information on how operational stress can affect individuals, their peers, their subordinates, and those around them, and teach CF personnel what they can do to assist those with mental health issues.
Our goal is to provide our men and women who serve our country in uniform the tools to recognize early signs of mental health challenges and issues and to take positive action. This educational campaign has been expanded to CF families to also help them, help them support their loved ones and help them deal better with the effects of mental health problems suffered by those who serve. Family members of mental health sufferers will be involved in this initiative, and they are actually in town this week to help develop the curriculum.
Alignment of these initiatives will be ensured through a variety of things. First of all, there will be an arm's-length mental health services advisory committee, a joint initiative between us and Veterans Affairs Canada. Again, it is led by an experienced champion for OSI sufferers, Colonel (Retired) Don Ethell, who is an aggressive champion. I think you've already had the opportunity to talk to him. We will draw on a wide group of mental health experts through that committee.
We have re-established the Canadian Forces operational stress injury steering committee, which is a forum for our senior leadership, including me, to help discuss better ways to support those who have suffered an operational stress injury. I've never been a believer in committees, and I was part of the original operational stress injury steering committee. I actually think we can get some more value from it by having our leaders focus on it.
Establishing our special advisor to the chief of military personnel, Lieutenant-Colonel Grenier, who has himself suffered an operational stress injury, has been key to the initiatives already launched, and he, with his team, will build on the successes already achieved.
Let me just tell you something. I was in Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, just a month ago, I think it was, for a rally in red. I had the opportunity to talk to Mr. Jim Davis, who lost his boy in Afghanistan a year and a half ago, I believe it was. Mr. Davis, speaking with his knowledge of many of the other families who have lost their sons or daughters in Afghanistan, was full of nothing but praise for this officer here and the leadership and support he has provided to those families in their darkest hours and darkest days.
Notwithstanding these major advancements in clinical and non-clinical health care, we have many challenges. All of us know that.
[Translation]
Bases like Petawawa and Gagetown that have sent large segments of their communities on deployments continue to have their mental health services stretched. Part of the challenge is the geographic location of the bases and the resulting difficulty in finding, attracting and retaining necessary skill sets in local areas. This challenge is common to most rural communities in Canada. To address this, the Canadian Forces will leverage their neighbouring regional mental health centres in areas such as Ottawa and Halifax.
[English]
The Canadian Forces health care system as a whole is strong, but I do believe we have actually just recovered from a deficit. We think we have a solid base on which to build the kind of health care system that we believe is absolutely necessary, and we are working hard to improve it every day. We remain confident in our overall health care system, but we still work hard to improve it.
While no system is perfect, patient satisfaction, and the surveys that come from them, consistently show that the health care system is meeting the vast majority of patient needs. We'd like to have it perfect. It's not, but we work hard to try to make it that way. We, the leaders, are fully aware of the impact that mental health and operational stress injuries have on our members and their families. We actively support our mental health care initiatives and provide leadership that we believe is right and fundamental for those people. All of these efforts will need both the support and the funding of the Government of Canada for years to come, because the effects of mental health injuries are sometimes felt decades after the initial diagnosis. I think our men and women deserve that, and they certainly need that kind of leadership from you.
Thank you very much. I'm prepared to take your questions, Mr. Chair.
:
I thought your third question was going to be whether my Toronto Maple Leafs watch was still working. But like the team, it hasn't told time very well for about 41 years, and it's a major challenge.
I don't think there's one single thing, but it all comes to one single thing. This is something I believe in very fervently: being valued is worth its weight in gold, and being valued means actions, not just words. Excuse my language, but we have a little slogan in the army: “Bullshit walks and action talks”.
That's so true for our men and women when they're out doing something. When you're on that dirty, dusty, dangerous trail in Kandahar, and you're 12,000 kilometres away from home, and it's 51 degrees centigrade, and you're carrying 80 or 85 pounds, and somebody is shooting at you, you can be forgiven for thinking you're in this all alone, all by yourself, and nobody cares.
“Being valued” means taking action to ensure that our young people, whether they're wearing the army, navy, or air force uniform, understand that they're connected to Canada every single second. They need to understand that they have the right leadership in place, that they've had the opportunity with the dollars given to them to be able to receive the right training in a comprehensive and intelligent manner—and we're getting a lot better at this, though we haven't always done it smartly in the past—that they have absolutely the right equipment, and that when conditions change we can react quickly and get that equipment to them. They need to believe that Canadians see what they're doing, appreciate it, and show their support for it. “Being valued” is worth its weight in gold.
If we can take actions that practically show that value in a variety of ways, then that means more than anything else. Our people have to be prepared to take risks. They have to be competent and know they're taking risks for noble reasons. Knowing that they're sustained by our nation allows people to deal with an awful lot. Increasing funding would help us to deal with some of the challenges of support, sustainment, and recovery from mental health injuries, operational stress injuries, and post-traumatic stress disorders. Those kinds of things are practical demonstrations of what actually allow people to believe fundamentally that they are valued. I think that counts for more than anything else. That's not just one thing. It is “action, not words”.
I too would like to welcome General Hillier and thank him for his services to the Canadian Forces. When he came to Saint-Jean a few years ago to see his son receive his degree, he invited me to go running with him. As we are about the same age and as I was training at the time, I thought I would be able to keep up. Regrettably, after a few minutes, I realized that, not only was he ahead of me, he also had the legs of a man of 20. In a small way, that shows what General Hillier has been able to accomplish and gives an idea of the great respect he inspires in the men and women he commands. Each time I saw him with them, I saw what charisma means. I will end by saying that the Bloc Québécois has a great deal of admiration for what you have done. I wish you a very happy retirement.
In your presentation, you talked a lot about treatment, about the fact that people with wounds or post-traumatic stress have access to services on their return. I must acknowledge that, for several years, the Canadian Forces have taken health issues seriously, especially post-traumatic stress disorder. It is true that more and more effort is being put into helping these people get back on their feet. Can we talk a little about prevention?
It has been explained to me that attempts are made to train as close as possible to the theatre of operations. I have been to several of these places, and I understand, I think, that there is nothing worse for a battle-ready soldier, trained for action, to see atrocities being committed while having to obey orders to do nothing. Everyone was talking about Srebrenitza when I was in Bosnia during rotation 9. That was then, now we have to deal with the present.
Questions were asked in the House of Commons today about alleged sexual assaults committed by members of the Afghan army. There are reports that our officers and soldiers are witnessing these assaults and that the officers are issuing orders not to report them.
You are going to retire soon and I would like your opinion. I would also like to hear you guarantee that you have ordered all the officers presently in the theatre of operations not to demand that situations of that kind be kept secret and that nothing be done. They cannot give orders like that. Can you be absolutely clear that that is the case?
I am pleased that you are here with us this afternoon. We are finally able to meet the person responsible for the Canadian Forces. This responsibility rests with you and I can only hope that the problem will be resolved.
:
Sir, thank you for the question. Let me walk through a couple of points.
First, we went through a terrible time in the former Republic of Yugoslavia, in the Balkans, when under the mission mandate and the rules of engagement and the legal constraints we had soldiers standing around and watching what was equivalent to ethnic cleansing. All of us know about that. That was a terrible time, and it was more difficult for soldiers to come home feeling satisfied, which is a key part of staying healthy from a mission like that than almost anything else you would do in your life.
Secondly, when our soldiers, sailors, airmen and airwomen-- because they are all there and sometimes we forget the last three pieces—when they go abroad for us, as they are now in Kandahar, in Afghanistan, they go with the very best values our country holds near and dear to our hearts. They walk them, they live them on a daily basis here, and we expect them to.
Thirdly, we're not the inspector general for the Afghan national security forces, so we don't go in and pry into all their details. But to the essence of what you said, sir, let me simply say that if we are in Afghanistan, we're there to help the people of Afghanistan. Yes, we're there to work and help build the Afghan national security forces very directly. If we witness any kind of serious abuse—I'm trying to think of exactly the words to say—of individuals, I expect that my soldiers, sailors, and airmen and airwomen are going to immediately alert their chain of command, and that chain of command, with those soldiers, is going to take action to stop any kind of serious abuse.
Just in case there is any doubt of that, I have reconfirmed that direction down through the entire chain of command into Kandahar province to make sure the CDS's intent and our expectations as a nation are absolutely clear to all and sundry, and they are. If there is any serious abuse of Afghans, and I think we've had some good examples in the past year.... I know there was a young sergeant, for example, who was caught on TV cameras, saying, “You know, I'm concerned that if these people are handed over to the Afghan national security forces, who were there at the time, they may be beaten, injured or killed, and we're not going to do that; we're not going to let them go over.”
That's the kind of behaviour we expect. That's the kind we're going to reinforce through our chain of command. That's what Canadian soldiers give us all the time. We will do an investigation to see if there is any witnessing of anything that's occurred in the past and see if we've not done that kind of thing, but I guarantee what you said, my CDS guidance and direction down the chain of command is absolutely, unequivocally clear.
:
Well, I would say that the gap has been eternal. You mentioned World War II and even, obviously, when we had veterans alive, World War I, right up to the former Yugoslavia.
I am actually surprised that we had any treatment program for people who came out of Bosnia, Croatia, Somalia, and places like that. As we were quadrupling the operations we were conducting worldwide, we were dismantling the medical system and getting rid of all those kinds of things because of the pressures under which we came. So I'm absolutely amazed that we had any kind of treatment, and I know it wasn't very good.
We have done a lot of work since then. But as I said earlier, we're just coming out of a deficit. Actually, I think we've just gotten ourselves back to a level playing field, and it's going to take some more months and years to get and build the kind of medical system that can actually look after all the people and their physical injuries and wounds and mental injuries and wounds.
We have made some progress. From five years ago to two years ago to even six months ago, the progress has been dramatic. It'll be better six months from now than it is right now. I think a telling point is that we're actually getting veterans from those earlier campaigns now coming forward, because the stigma has been removed somewhat. They have confidence that they'll get treatment and will usually get the right treatment.
But that doesn't sort of cover the fact that we still have significant challenges. We don't have enough of the right people in the right places. In an organization of 87,000 people, you're still going to have people who view it this way as opposed to people who view it that way. And not all will have the same positive outlook that an injury is an injury is an injury, whether it's physical or mental. We work every single day to change that.
It's a slow process. But I think it has been an almost miraculous change in the last two or three years to be able to come to grips with a significant number of injuries and the larger number of mental health injuries or operational stress injuries or post-traumatic stress. I think the change has been dramatic, and we just want to keep building on that.
Every single day we are clearer in terms of how we want to approach it. We get better policies in place, and policies are important, because they allow the universal treatment of folks. Then we actually get all the pieces coming together in places like Edmonton, and in places like Petawawa and Gagetown, particularly. We know we've had some very unique challenges in those last two places.
So I don't make any apologies, Madam. We've done a massive amount of work. We've had great satisfaction, for the most part.
There are still people who have not been seen quickly enough. We perhaps have not helped identify quickly enough that they have a challenge, or perhaps we didn't recognize that. I don't ever say for a moment that there's not some guilt on all of us. All I can say is that the leadership is committed. We've put the resources into it. We really have. And this man here on my left has been doing that on our behalf and on behalf of the people there.
We still struggle, though, as you know, getting the right kind of experts in place and getting them to a place like Petawawa. I mean, I love Petawawa. Having done three tours there, I'd live the rest of my life there. But not everyone who has the kind of specialty we need wants to go to Petawawa or to Gagetown. So we still struggle somewhat with all these things.
:
First of all, Mr. Hawn, thank you for mentioning those three fine young soldiers. I had the opportunity to spend Saturday night at a gala ball for the Military Families Fund in Calgary with Master Corporal Paul Franklin, his wife Audra, and his mother-in-law.
I've also had the chance to see Will Salikin, incredible young man that he is, and Corporal Jeffrey Bailey, massive young man that he is, many times since they were wounded. We had almost given up hope that those last two young men were actually going to be with us today, and we view this as a real miracle.
Paul Franklin is my personal hero. Every day when I get out of bed and hobble around my room with my creaking bones and aching muscles, whining and whinging about it, I stop, shut up, and think about Paul Franklin and what he goes through to live the life he's living.
We have had a revolution in how we look at the military family. We're going against hundreds of years of British army tradition that became Canadian army tradition. I jokingly tell audiences that we used to have the saying in the army, “If the army had wanted you to have a family, they would have issued you one.” That's how we treated people. That was the attitude we had. We have changed that attitude significantly. The Military Families Fund gala in Calgary on Saturday night, where 550 Canadians came out to pay tribute, is just one indicator that the change is starting to take root.
We include the family in all we do. We include the family in briefings, preparations, and discussions of the missions that we're going on. We have a deployment support centre at every major base or unit, and they have reached out to those families in a way that we had never even contemplated when we were doing operations back in the nineties and eighties and seventies.
We have brought them in to make sure they always know what's going on, and we support them in a variety of ways. We help prepare those families—we don't necessarily do it very well, but we're working at it—to help in the reintegration when their loved one comes home from mission. Sometimes there might be some problems, but in the majority of cases, no. We help them to be able to reintegrate their family and carry on with their normal family life. We have done that in a whole variety of ways. We have the chain of command and the family structure on side.
What we've also had to do, though—and I do this personally—is tap the families on the shoulder once in a while and say, “Okay, this can't be all us.” I went to Edmonton and sat down with 12 wives in the MFRC. The husbands of nine wives had just come home after six months and the husbands of three of the wives were still there for the nine-month tour. I said, “How many of you have used the services here at MFRC?” Several of them said they hadn't at all. Several said they didn't know anything about the services. And there were a variety of other comments. I said, “How many actually attended the briefings that were going on?” Actually, very few of them had attended at that stage.
We've changed that dynamic. But still, there is a responsibility on the wife, the husband, and the family. When we give them the invitation and say, “We're going to walk through this and we're going to talk to the challenges”, they have a responsibility to meet us halfway. That's the other side of the coin. We're working with families every day to do that.
We have actually changed how the MFRC supports our families. There was a successful coming together of the leaders of the MFRCs in Toronto on the 23rd and 24th of May. And I had an opportunity to walk through where we need to change, where we need to put the emphasis and resources, and how we can do things better. We don't want to be just a silo in Petawawa. We want to take lessons from Halifax, Bagotville, and Edmonton.
We've had some incredibly positive feedback. I was in Edmonton. On Sunday afternoon, I flew directly there from the Calgary ball the night before, and I had the opportunity to visit with two soldiers, both of whom had recently returned. One was Private Anthony Price, a 22-year-old soldier who was wounded in the arm and shoulder. What an incredible young man. He has all the support he needs and is well on his way to recovery. He cannot wait to go back to the mission, and he wants to go back before his rotation is finished. So that's our goal with him, to let him do that.
The second guy was Major Mark Campbell. He was there with his wife Donna, who is a warrant officer in the Canadian Forces. Also present were his 9-year-old daughter Meaghan and his son, Steven, 12 years old. Just sitting and talking with that family for an hour, I could tell that they have the support they need. They feel like they're wrapped in our arms, and our arms are your arms, all the way around here, because you are the political leaders of our country, and that means a lot to them.
So we've made some progress. We've made some dramatic progress. Do we still have a long way to go? Yes, we do.
:
I think the key word here is “balance”. We've known, since time immemorial, that time away adds to the stress and that time away with risk added to it adds to the stress even more.
When I was a brigade commander in Petawawa in the mid-1990s, the families used to tell me that they didn't mind a deployment into Bosnia for six or seven months at a time, but it was the three- to five-month workup training added to that that led to a year of separation. They said they'd actually put up with the tour, if they could do away with the pre-deployment training. So we worked significantly to reduce that time away, when people were back home in Canada. We trained them locally as much as possible; we trained Monday to Friday and they were home on the weekends. We had some success with that.
When we got into the Afghanistan operation, however, we realized that we had lost a lot during the intervening decades since World War II and Korea. In order to do justice to our young men and women, and to their families, and to give them every chance of going into Afghanistan and being successful in executing the missions that we asked them to execute, and at the same time being ready in all the ways I talked about in my opening remarks, we actually had to expand that front-end pre-deployment training in a huge way so that the risk to them was reduced to the lowest level possible. We did that, and that added another stressor. But we did it after considering all the risks that would occur if we didn't do it.
We have now reached a stage where we have sufficient experience across the Canadian Forces, particularly in the land forces that are executing the bulk of that mission, that we are now cutting the pre-deployment training. I just had conversations with the army commander, Lieutenant-General Leslie, and we are now reducing that pre-deployment training, and therefore the time away from home, by six to seven weeks, which is a significant chunk of time. We're also doing more training and more front-end preparation in the local training area as much as we possibly can, and constraining to one very specific pocket a major deployment in western Canada.
For the rotations themselves, we guarantee 12 months back home in Canada, unless there's a very real reason, and then we have a discussion with those individuals. The reality is that it's between 18 and 24 months for much of the Canadian Forces and actually longer than that for the majority.
We have some small parts of the Canadian Forces that have closer to 12 months back home in Canada, and that's the part we'd like to stretch out. We do that in a variety of ways: by having taskings from outside the army in a huge way by asking if we actually need a soldier in that job or is this a skill set that a sailor, airman, or airwoman could bring in, and therefore task from outside, to reduce that stress level on soldiers; by keeping tours, ideally, with somewhere between 18 and 24 months guaranteed at home with their families, and guaranteed at home so they don't have pre-deployment training kicking in for long periods of time; and we try to keep the duration of rotations at what we believe is the maximum best-value duration, and we know that somewhere between six to seven months is about right.
We get a great return on the immense investment we put in for the build-up and train-up. We get a great return in-theatre where people take a couple of months to learn the environment and then that last couple of weeks they are really focused on handing off to the next individuals coming in. So we want the maximum amount of time when they're at their very best to get the effect. So we know it's around six to seven months, and that's what we're trying to stay to. I think we're going to be successful at doing that for most of the folks, particularly the battle groups themselves outside.
So the combination of right tour lengths, right periods of time back here in Canada with their family's support in the right way between those tours, and to actually intelligently and ruthlessly shape the pre-deployment training to reduce the time away from their families as much as possible allows you to be able to carry on careers over a significantly longer period of time.
I will tell you that one of the things we are looking at is having folks spend one or two basic engagements at four years each in the combat arms and then moving large numbers of them into combat service support trades around the Canadian Forces, so that their next missions are very different from those. So there are a variety of measures. But a sailor, a soldier, an airman, or airwoman, is going to expect to spend their time deploying, and we're asking how we can do that in balance so that we have a healthy family, a healthy individual in uniform, and actually have conditions set for success in the longer term.
:
Sir, I'd like to say two things, if I could. Please bear with me, if you don't mind.
One, after I retire on July 2, I'm going to have another career; I'm going to find something else to do. I want to contribute to our great country in some way, shape, or form. What I'm not going to do is perhaps most clear: I'm not going to become a political leader. I tell you this because I know most of you. I've had the opportunity and real privilege to work with you over these past years. I stand in admiration of you. We don't treat political leaders in our country very well at all; we don't hold them in great esteem, normally speaking. I just watch you in awe at what you put up with and what has been imposed on your families by your selection as political leaders in Canada.
So I salute you and say well done. We need political leaders. I am not going to be one of them; I'll just say that one more time.
Secondly, I'll close here by mentioning Colonel Grenier. He is a great officer. I mentioned what Jim Davis, the dad of young Paul Davis, said to me down in Bridgewater. What he actually said was this guy is doing an awesome job, and he's at the front of our team that relates to families. Jim Davis' concern was that now that I was leaving as Chief of Defence Staff—this was just a few days after I had made my announcement—Colonel Grenier wouldn't have the top cover, etc., to go off and do the things that he's been doing, etc. I said, make no mistake there, Jim. Lieutenant-General Walter Natynczyk is now the CDS-designate. He's going to take over on July 2. I have worked with that officer; I've known him since 1983 and have worked with him on multiple occasions. He wears his values on his sleeve. His actions articulate his values and his care, his compassion, and his concern for the men and women who serve in the air, land, and sea elements of the Canadian Forces, and for their families. They are first and foremost in his order of priorities.
What Colonel Grenier has been doing, with the support of a team like this, will certainly be brought to even greater levels and be reinforced in every way possible by Lieutenant-General Natynczyk when he becomes the Chief of Defence Staff. He's the best officer that I've had the privilege to work with in my life. I have to tell you, one of the things I am very confident about as I leave as Chief of Defence Staff is that I'm handing over to the right officer.
Thank you very much for your time here this afternoon. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.
Some hon. members: Hear, hear!