Proceedings of the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs
Issue 7 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Wednesday, May 28, 2003
The Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 12:08 p.m. to examine the health care provided to veterans of war and of peacekeeping missions; the implementation of the recommendations made in its previous reports on such matters; the terms of service, post- discharge benefits and health care of members of the regular and reserve forces as well as members of the RCMP and of civilians who have served in close support of uniformed peacekeepers; and all other related matters.
Senator Michael A. Meighen (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: We will call to order this meeting of the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs to continue our examination on the health care provided to veterans of war and peacekeeping missions, the recommendations made in previous reports, and the terms of service, post-discharge benefits and health care of members of the regular and reserve forces, members of the RCMP and civilians who have served in close support of uniformed peacekeepers and other related matters.
My name is Michael Meighen. I am a senator from Ontario and I have the honour of chairing this subcommittee.
We do expect other senators to join us, but for the moment, on my far right is Senator Wiebe from Saskatchewan. On my immediate right is Senator Kenny from Ontario. Senator Kenny also chairs the Committee on National Security and Defence, of which we are a subcommittee. On my left is Senator Michael Forrestall from Nova Scotia. Senator Atkins from Ontario should be arriving momentarily.
Today we are particularly pleased to have as our last witness before the summer break, General Roméo Dallaire. I do not think we could have chosen a better witness than General Dallaire, who is, of course, well known to Canadians, having enjoyed a most distinguished military career, and indeed, if I may so, in his post-military life as a spokesperson for members of the Canadian Forces suffering from PTSD — post-traumatic stress disorder, for those who are not familiar with the acronym — and other mental problems caused by the inevitable stresses and strains of military life.
Gen. Dallaire, we welcome you and thank you for coming today.
[Translation]
It is an honour for us to welcome today Lieutenant-General, Retired, Roméo Dallaire at this, the last scheduled meeting of the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs before the summer break. All Canadians are deeply grateful to you, Mr. Dallaire, for your efforts during your time in the military and in your post-military life. You have the floor.
Lieutenant-General (ret'd) Roméo Dallaire, O.C., C.M.M., M.S.C., C.D.: Thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs, for inviting me here today. I would like to give you an overview of the situation, clarify a few things for your benefit and make a few suggestions.
I prepared some notes which I understand were circulated to you at the last minute. Therefore, I will dispense with reading them. Instead, I will review the highlights of my prepared text. However, I will be happy to take your questions later. Indeed, when questions are exchanged, that is when truth, transparency and the desire to provide the best possible answers shine through. This is clearly reflected in your reports.
[English]
You have been holding hearings on this subject now for quite a while, and have received testimony from senior Canadian Forces authorities and, of course, from the Department of Veterans Affairs on the subject of the arena in which we find ourselves, with our new-generation veterans and their ability, their compensation and their pursuit of their careers, and/or new careers, in either another aspect of the military or also in civilian life.
I applaud the concern regarding the reserves, as in the entire analysis of the situation, the weakest, and I would consider the most dangerous, component of casualties of this new era of conflict resolution resides within the reservists. On the one hand, we have been significantly increasing the use of reservists, and if you remember the Medak pocket, which was a major Canadian operation, 40 per cent of the troops involved there were reservists.
As we continue to rely on reservists to fill the desperate inadequacies in personnel in the regular force, we also have found ourselves less than capable of meeting their complex requirements, as they tend to not make a full career of the reserve, and so leave earlier. They live away from major bases, in villages. Their regimental structure, or their squadron structure and so on, does not have the ability to respond to these complex possibilities of injury and reaction.
In this new era, the injury dimension has come to the fore — the injury dimension in both the physical, classic sense, and in the historical mental sense; however, as we see, and have seen, the non-classic injuries, at times even called ``non- honourable'' injuries, have in fact been taking the highest toll within the forces.
This new era that I speak of is, of course, the era of the post-Cold War, an era where in fact peacekeeping in the classic sense took a beating, to the extent that the classic chapter six, Cyprus style of peacekeeping is near nonexistent. Yet we still use the term ``peacekeeping'' as a general statement covering peacemaking, peace enforcing, and all other types of employment of force and mandates regarding peace.
In fact, we entered an era not of peacekeeping, nor of classic warfare by force on force that we have known for centuries, where armies face each other with different uniforms, different equipment, identifiable lines between them and a clear outcome of winners and losers. That Cold War classic warfare has nearly dissipated in this era, and as such is more the exception than the rule for the employment of force in the international community.
We entered an era that was a vacuum, the conflict resolution era, which was not war, not peace, but something in the middle. In that middle, we discovered that we were into an entirely new generation of capabilities and requirements to meet these complex mandates and missions containing a new set of parameters in regards to the use or non-use of force and the impact on the forces.
I mean that we have found ourselves in an era where moral and ethical dilemmas, the restriction on the use of force, the frustrations and the inability to intervene, the complexity of the orders coming down and the rules of engagement have all joined together to create a scenario in which, in the end, the corporal standing at the barrier often has no room to manoeuvre to influence the situation.
I started this era commanding a brigade in Valcartier in 1991, and by 1993 I had over 3,700 of my 5,200 troops involved in foreign areas, from Cambodia to the Middle East, and at the time, in ex-Yugoslavia extensively. In that time frame, our backdrop was either use of maximum force or classic peacekeeping.
We were sending troops on operations with few specific skills for the complexity of the problems that we were facing or the depth of the human dilemmas that these nations who were imploding were living out because of the departure of the overarching Cold War, East-West dilemma. We now enter that era, particularly in the leadership area, stumbling and crisis managing. We are learning, as we hoped, lessons that can help those in the field accomplish their missions.
Into now nearly the 12th year of such operations, and looking into the future, Canada will send troops, will still be involved in advancing its philosophy of life, its beliefs in human rights, its belief that we should support those in need and assist in stabilizing nations so innocent people can thrive and advance in future generations. However, we have to question whether or not we have covered all the bases.
We have seen some movement in trying to change the orientation of pure war fighting, classical warfare, in the forces to be able to handle these complex missions, in which we do not even have definitions for the action verbs we must use in our mission statements. Let me give you an example. We spent 40-odd years in NATO building a lexicon in which we all knew what to attack, to defend and so on meant. However, we found ourselves in the 1990s, in this era, with missions that say something like ``to establish an atmosphere of security.'' What does that mean? How far do the troops go in exposing themselves in response to such an order? How far do the leaders expose the troops to accomplish such missions? All that is against a backdrop of the nation not being at risk and not necessarily having any self-interest in those areas where we are operating.
This new era of conflict resolution has brought with it, of course, new aspects of soldiering and a tempo unseen in the past. A new generation of injuries has come to the fore as we have been receiving, after so many of these missions, casualties who have been suffering from, not necessarily the classic, historical, honourable injuries of the body, but the non-classic injury, certainly not recognizable on the same scale as the physical injuries — those who have come back suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome or mental injury. I use the term ``injury'' because yes, the brain is affected, but so is the whole mental being.
We also entered an era that was unlike that experienced by those coming from Korea, when the forces were expanding and reaching the high-water mark of an advance into the future. By 1958-59 the Canadian Forces had over 125,000 personnel. We were into nuclear weapons in the army, the air force and so on. It was the greatest heyday of the advancement of the military since demobilization. There was a whole array of capabilities there, of optimism, for those coming back from Korea to fall into.
However, in the 1990s, we had personnel coming back and a month later being released because their jobs or their trades were being eliminated. They came back in an atmosphere far more like that of those returning from Vietnam than that experienced by the victors of the Second World War or those from Korea, with a military that was keen to have their experience and offered all kinds of opportunities, injured or not, to serve.
What of this era and what of the future? There are a few dimensions that I wish to raise. The first is that in this era, the families live the missions. The families are part of the missions. My mother-in-law told me upon my return from Africa in 1994 that she would never have survived the Second World War if she had had to go through it the way my family did — my wife did. That is to say, my father-in-law commanded a regiment in the Second World War. They had information that was, of course, vetted. It was limited, and they got mail, of course, when it was available. However, our families right now live the missions with us. Every moment they are awake they are surrounded by televisions and radios, waiting for the report that I have been shot, injured, ambushed, or taken away as a captive.
They see the operation as it is unfolding. They do not experience the smell, the lack of food and so on; however, the tension in the family is totally focused on what is happening, what they are seeing in the media and what they continue to see; that has opened a dimension of treatment for families and family members.
Treating the soldier sailor or air person as an individual, without extending it to the families, will not give us the result we are looking for in regards to a total rehabilitation of the soldier and re-employment, or realignment into civilian life.
Two members of my family had to go to professional therapy. Still today at 6 o'clock, nobody talks at the table, because the CBC news is on the radio and there are interviews afterwards. Those impacts are real, they are there and they create enormous tensions for the soldiers when they come home; and in fact in many cases destroy their ability to either recuperate properly or to continue with a family life.
More often than not, the family disintegrates and individuals find themselves alone, which exacerbates their state of mind, and then the extreme end state, of course, is suicide. Families are part of the equation. They are no longer just the dependants; they are part of the missions and the operational effectiveness of the troops.
The second dimension that I wish to raise is that in this era, for the most part, there are proportionally more non- visual injuries than visual injuries. We find ourselves ill at ease or ill-equipped to handle all the different nuances that that brings about within the leadership, within the units, and in the care of the people.
We now have people who have been thrown in jail. We have had people court-martialled. We have people who have turned to drugs and are now on the wrong side of the law. We have had people who had their careers totally destroyed because of aggression and inability to conduct their normal duties, often because of drunkenness. We have had these ``bad cats'' in the classic sense, being assessed as just that, as bad cats. Whereas in fact a number, if not most, of these are cases of PTSD or stress-related injury in operations that have not been watched, assessed and helped.
They have been allowed to degenerate to the extent where they end up — ex-military and some still serving — in jail because they have become a problem, and because we have not been able to proactively anticipate their injury and in fact respond to it. That is the second dimension that I believe is there.
The third one is, there still exists within the different bureaucracies a sense of peacetime soldiering. Canadian Forces are not at peace. Canadian Forces have been at war since the end of the Cold War. Canadian Forces were in the Cold War. It was, professionally, the most rewarding experience to be able to serve overseas. It was the apogee of our ability to develop our skill sets. It was a nice quality of life.
This is not that era. This is an era where soldiers, sailors and air persons are going to war zones. They are going repeatedly because there are not enough of them. They are sustaining the effects of these war zones and they are not in a state of peace, they are in a state of war. More accurately, in the terminology that I would like to propose, they are in a ``state of conflict resolution'' all the time.
As such, just like the British used to do for many years, keeping their troops involved in some war here and there for experience, we now not only have troops gaining experience in all of these conflicts, but in fact we have reached saturation point with those missions, to the extent it is burning out the capabilities of the troops to continue to sustain it. In this era, where we find ourselves with soldiers continuously in a state of operational readiness, we have developed a high level of intolerance for damaged goods.
I was medically released from the Canadian Forces. I did not retire. I had more than two more years to serve. I was medically released because I did not have the ability to command troops in operations any more. I simply did not have the ability to sustain that level of stress. I was working, I was going to international tribunals on Rwanda, and the doctor simply said, ``He cannot be treated. Either he stops working, or he drops Rwanda, but he cannot keep both going.''
In fact, what I was trying to do was kill myself at work. I was released for medical reasons because I could not respond to the medical processes, which ultimately would have released me anyway a little later, but it took more direct action, because the medication and the capability to stabilize me simply were not there. In an era of people serving like this, we are finding ourselves burning out and abusing human beings beyond the normal requirements of the structure of our forces.
We are no longer a peacetime army waiting for world war three. We are an army continuously in the field, in conflict, taking casualties, sustaining that and continuously having our operational tensions increased, and therefore the number of operational injuries will continue to rise. This is not a crisis that we are solving. This is a state that is going to continue, and it will increase exponentially if we do not get enough soldiers, if in fact we do not permit more to participate, for we will simply accelerate the inability of families and individuals to sustain this level of operational state.
The whole bureaucratic structure still sees the forces as in post-demobilization mode, training for the next war. Some colleagues tend to sell that, world war three or classic warfare. That is not the mindset that the bureaucracy and the political leadership have to adopt in regards to what is happening with the Canadian Forces. They are now continuously at war in conflict situations, and the bureaucracy's compensation processes, the social contract with the troops, have to reflect now this operational standing, and not a peacetime army, training and waiting for the next war.
The last point: Because of the nature of the injury and the rather swift, and some might even say generous, response to those who have been suffering from it from Veterans Affairs and certain quarters in National Defence, there is a growing attitude within both bureaucracies that maybe some are using this new, complex injury to abuse the system and advance their personal needs.
I think that backlash is normal. My concern when I was the Assistant Deputy Minister of Human Resources, when we were bringing in these things, was always: What happens if people start to abuse it? How will you know who abuses it? How will you assess that? Furthermore, if your assessment is moving towards a sense that people are trying to abuse this, will that change how you respond to those who are injured? Will we in fact go back to days gone by, the days of our Second World War veterans? I can give you the example of both my father and father-in-law. Whenever they went to Veterans Affairs Canada for compensation, they were seen as trying to rip off the system and get free money from the government, versus those who have a valid requirement for compensation from the nation for the sacrifices and the injuries they sustained.
I am now preaching about the general state of mental health in the forces. There are injuries being sustained by a corporal working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for months on end in the depot in Montreal to try to sustain the forces in the field. Abuses are being committed there in terms of the ability to continue to work, and against the staff officers in NDHQ in the operations branch, who never go home, never sleep and are continuously under the gun. Some of them have been serving there for two or three years and there is an impact on them.
Mental health generally is not even touched upon. It is still buried down there in the processes of compensation and recognition. Physical injuries are at the top and there is an immediate response. The system has problems because there are too many peacetime bureaucratic processes and decisions. Your committee is certainly involved in that dimension. The middle ground, which is ``fast tracked,'' is the post-traumatic stress syndrome injuries.
I am stating that post-traumatic stress disorder injuries have to be treated with the same level of commitment and the same purity of thought regarding those who are injured as the classic physical injuries. We have to take care of those who are suffering from mental ill health, which can occur even before people in the forces are deployed, let alone during the impact of the deployment, at the same level as we care for people with physical operational injuries — because the limb can become gangrenous and die.
There has been a lot of pressure, and so we have responded to a crisis, and now who is trying to mess up the system, abuse it and play it? The other group down here with the mental ill health, well, we do not have time for them, so we will let things run their normal, difficult course, with the stigmas and all the rest, in trying to find compensation for them.
Senators, we are at an appropriate point to conduct the analysis of the support needed on what is in fact the injury of this era. It has been about five years since my first memo in late 1997 in regards to this, and the work has continued since then. There have been great advances. However, there is much danger of a backlash if we try to marry post- traumatic stress disorder with mental ill health, where the troops will rebel against being considered mentally sick. If it is an operational injury, fine, but mentally sick is a different matter. We are also in an era where those who are physically injured are treated with the same urgency as in operations, and compensated with the same philosophy as for the normal war casualties, but not in isolation from those who have been operationally injured.
The Chairman: General Dallaire, that was helpful, illuminating and a complete analysis of the situation. I know it will bring more questions. Perhaps before we go any further, you might introduce your colleague.
LGen Dallaire: I am sorry. This is Major (Ret.) Hyman. We have served together. He is my research assistant and has taken on the mandate of communication with your committee and others as I do my work in different areas.
Senator Wiebe: Your presentation certainly gave me great food for thought, not only as it relates to Veterans Affairs, but also to our parent committee on defence and security. I must say that you answered a number of questions I had, but I would like to pose one question that relates to a television program on CBC on Monday night, following the news. Did you have the opportunity to see that?
LGen Dallaire: Yes.
Senator Wiebe: Should the military find a place for an individual recovering from post-traumatic stress disorder, as was explained on that program? Does the individual have a strong case?
LGen Dallaire: When the Canadian Forces were in their ascendancy — before the attrition that began with the 1964 white paper and has continued since then, to the point where some day, we may say we will not have an army tomorrow — we had a lot of places in the units to care for injured troops in the regiments. We found them jobs in sports stores or the mess, things like that. The young ones saw that as taking care of our own, and it had a positive impact. Those who were living that experience felt they had a home.
However, we did some pretty nasty things. Sometimes, if they caused too many problems, they were thrown out into the street. Often, the DVA did not know about them until perhaps somebody assisted them. In that era, there was room for our injured to manoeuvre. Today there is no room. There is literally no room for the ``damaged goods,'' the pejorative term used by some of my colleagues. There is no room for the injured. The operational requirement of the forces necessitates the application of universality of service. Whether or not those forces are structured to actually put forward the troops in the way that we should is another subject for the other committee.
The Chairman: Excuse me for interrupting; can you explain, for the record, what ``universality of service'' means? Does that mean being able to go anywhere any time and carry out your duties?
LGen Dallaire: Yes, sir. It means meeting the criteria of your trade, whether it is in the infantry, or operational units, or pilots; pilots have a high level of capability, physical and mental capability. It is a little less in a support trade. That came more to the fore in the early 1990s, and was applied ruthlessly in the mid-1990s when we were reducing the forces. Even though we had people coming back, as I said earlier, with a medal for bravery, we were still throwing them out within weeks, injured or not, because of reductions. Universality of service meant that with any injury that prevented you from meeting that requirement, you were released. You were not automatically reclassified or given another trade in a lower category, because we were releasing everybody. If you did not meet the original one, you were out, because we had too many troops. The orders were to reduce the numbers. I sat through all of that as Deputy Commander of the Army and then as the Assistant Deputy Minister of Human Resources.
That was applied ruthlessly; that exercise meant that also I found myself in front of the Human Rights Commission, which was saying that we should be hiring people with disabilities to meet the four criteria of the Charter. In that debate, could there be room to meet both requirements by trying to do more active reclassification of troops into a category that does not require the same level of fitness or capability, and only in the extreme case that we could not do that would we then release them. That is still an embryonic process, because many trades are not keen on getting somebody from another trade who might now be coming down to their level, if I can use that phrase. Hopefully it does not come across the wrong way and put limitations on them.
Universality of service can be applied ruthlessly. It can be applied, we are hoping, with far more sensitivity to the capabilities of the people. Maybe we cannot deploy them, but we need that skill set and to retain that investment. That is where the mental health, in particular the PTSD, exercise comes in, because if you lose an arm or a couple of legs, it becomes difficult to re-employ you in the forces. However, if you suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, you have the ability to recover to a level where you are still functional, still employable. Thus, that investment of maybe a couple of million dollars in you, plus the experience, can still be maximized. However, because of the limitations and the size of the forces, that aspect was thrown out and people were released.
Now they are starting to consider bringing in that capability. Gen. Couture has spoken to us about some of the possible methodologies, but there is still the stigma inside the forces, the idea of not wanting damaged goods, and so they make it difficult for that to happen. People are still being released who could be employable, and in fact useful to the forces.
As my paper says, I was approached last fall by a group of new-generation veterans in Montreal. Most of them are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and felt that they had not been treated properly. They did not even know about all the changes, and their concern was also with retroactivity. They are starting to figure out that we can help them now, yet they were injured in 1993.
My driver, when I was Deputy Commander of the Army, was the photographer to the battalion that went into Sarajevo with MGen Lewis McKenzie. His job was to take pictures. He kept some of them — buckets full of heads and nasty things of that nature. This driver lived through that, and I had just come back from Rwanda, so we made a phenomenal pair. That group is still suffering. Their ambition at that time was to bring the government to court and a splinter group decided that they would go ahead. The larger group asked me to intervene, and I have been working with both ministries, attempting to bridge the communication gap and give them an opportunity to work on not only the current needs, but also the retroactivity dimension. If they are not satisfied with that, you might expect to see some other group come forward with the lawsuit again.
Senator Wiebe: My question was more related to that part of your answer in which you said that maybe the armed forces should be looking again at making a home for our personnel and finding a place for people recovering from PTSD within the military.
LGen Dallaire: We were throwing them out after six months. Now they have somewhere between two and three years, but we are still not making a home for them. If I may say so, we are in a catch-22. You have all of these missions and you need all of these troops. You do not have enough. Those troops are burning out and the number of casualties is increasing. You are throwing them out because you do not have the ability to use all the injured ones in other trades and so on. You are losing experience, and in the end, you are abusing human beings.
Senator Wiebe: When we deploy our troops, regardless of where they may be going, they are extremely well trained. In fact, they are some of the best-trained troops in the world. Do we have the ability, before deployment, to educate or train — ``prepare'' is probably the better word — individuals who may be going over there? I am thinking about prevention. It is so much cheaper and better than having to go through the cure. Can we prepare individuals in regards to PTSD prior to deployment?
LGen Dallaire: Yes, sir.
Efforts are now being made to give them a sense of the atmosphere, of what to expect. There are persons within the organization with the skills to assist those who go through an immediate traumatic experience. We have professionals in the units to assist also during the deployment. We have increased the post-deployment efforts at early intervention to try to find those who might be affected and need to be debriefed.
I believe all of them must be debriefed and followed for maybe a year or so, because post-traumatic stress syndrome does not necessarily appear the day after the experience. In my case it took four years. In others it may take eight years. Efforts are being made; however, there is a lot of research that still has to be done on the preparation side. Experience is a great qualifier, and we have troops who have three or four missions under their belt, so they have lots of experience. Their state of mind is questionable, but at least they have lots of experience.
We have done work with the Americans. The head of the American centre on post-traumatic stress disorder is a Dr. Matthew Friedman, who is headquartered in White River Junction, Vermont. I went to see him to see if he could assist us in building our program, because, I said, we do not have 15 years to build it, we have months. His first response to me was, ``We will help you because we do not want you to carry the cross that we do.'' I said, ``What is it?'' He said that in 1998, they recorded 102,000 cases of suicide directly related to service in Vietnam — yet they lost 58,000 troops in the field — and they are still counting. There are soldiers who went to Sarajevo who are just waiting to pop up.
The crux of the matter, sir, is that if there are not enough troops, the missions are overwhelming. They are the right missions. We should be committed to the Congo and places like that, that is not the problem. The problem is that human beings and their families are being literally destroyed, because those excellent troops are being abused. Do not reduce the missions; that would be wrong. Put more troops in the field.
The Chairman: On your reference to the American experience, my understanding is that their knowledge of and experience with PTSD is largely based on the Vietnam experience?
LGen Dallaire: Historically, but not currently.
The Chairman: Could you extrapolate from the Vietnam experience to dealing with the problems that arise with our somewhat different, in some ways, ``peacekeeping operations'' in which the Canadian army has been involved?
LGen Dallaire: May I ask my colleague to respond.
Major (Ret'd) David G. Hyman, Research Assistant to Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire: We are also in contact with the Australians, who have been involved in Gulf one and Gulf two and Vietnam; they are more advanced than we are in treating people with PTSD. They have programs that recognize that depression and many of the mental illnesses that we do not classify as part of PTSD are all part of the same thing. Their program is global. PTSD is just one element of their mental health program, so the Australians have come a long way.
LGen Dallaire: We attended a symposium in the States on PTSD and the like, and I am still in contact with Dr. Friedman, informally, of course, on the subject. Their new research comes from events like the bombing of the marines in Lebanon and the more current operations in which they have been involved. They are finding more acute cases of PTSD in, as the common term used to be, the snake eaters, that is, the Special Forces. They are doing research with new data. The fallback is Vietnam, of course, and that is the sort of treatment exercise that they go through.
The only similarity between Vietnam veterans and our people is we were all coming back. I came back to an army that was being ripped apart, not only because of Somalia but because of reductions. The troops in Vietnam came back because the war was unpleasant; people did not care, and in fact discarded them. That is the only hard link.
Research on the impacts of this new era of conflict is still needed, and the Americans, because of the size of their deployed forces, do not necessarily have the same types of cases that we do, because we tend to send smaller numbers of troops who get far more intimately involved with the problems. The Americans had 22,000 troops in Haiti. The Canadian general who went in there under the auspices of the UN had 2,300 troops, of which half were Canadians, and the mission just flourished. They had a lot more intimate contact with the problem, with the people, with the cases. Individual soldiers were carrying a lot more responsibility.
Senator Kenny: I have noted that you are using the word ``injury'' repeatedly. It is a good word. It is a better than ``illness.'' Do you find it has become part of the vernacular, or do people still talk about it as an illness?
LGen Dallaire: Those who have an unsympathetic perspective on people having such injuries will still use ``illness'' pejoratively and put them into the same category as all other indescribable injuries that are not considered honourable.
Senator Kenny: If we cannot see it, it is an illness. If we can see it, it is an injury.
LGen Dallaire: Yes. This is a spin-off from the stigma attached to mental illness in the civilian population, except that in a Darwinian organization like the military, it is accentuated that much more. The breakthrough in getting more troops to come to the clinics or to open up was the fact that we were identifying it as an operational field injury, and not some sort of a mosquito bite that they got in the field over there that made them ill.
Veterans Affairs have gone a long way in using that term also; that has been helpful. The Australians have combined the mental health work; I am trying to advance a change in culture towards mental health and PTSD. If we move too fast with the PTSD and mental health and do not explain it well, people will start saying, ``Hey, I am mentally ill.'' You are not mentally ill, but you have an injury that has affected your mental ability. Someone who loses an arm is affected mentally by that loss, but a prosthesis permits that individual to at least adjust to it.
We hope to develop a prosthesis for this injury, so that when we do find ourselves vulnerable to a smell or something, we are able to identify it and stabilize ourselves to a level of performance. It is an injury. It is not a sickness. I find it disconcerting when operational injuries of the brain are simply called ``illnesses'' or ``sickness.''
Senator Kenny: I felt that Senator Wiebe was on the right track in asking about prevention. I understand where you are coming from, that you are looking at a body of individuals, including yourself, who have sustained these injuries and you are saying, ``How can we find treatment for them?''
Having said that, it is an incomplete analysis if we do not also look at the causes, and over the long haul, it makes a lot more sense economically to structure training, or the whole organization, in a way that minimizes the cause of these injuries.
I was troubled when you said, ``Do not reduce the missions.'' That is contradictory. That is not an acceptable answer. You are telling us that one of the problems is that we have had a reduction in the size of the forces and that the nature of the work is not like the peacekeeping we saw in Cyprus. People are experiencing too active a tempo of operations, and you are sitting there saying, ``Do not reduce it.'' You are saying, ``Carry on. Let us do the job. We can still maintain the same level of activity that we could when we had 85,000 members.'' Now, you cannot have it both ways.
LGen Dallaire: Senator, you have made an extrapolation that I did not.
First of all, this nation, its beliefs, values, work ethic, mastery of technology, non-colonial past, sensitivity to human rights and human values and so on, are such that it cannot stand aloof from the international community and those seeking help and support to eliminate problems of human rights abuses and of remaining in the morass of conflict. We just cannot stand there and say ``Tough.''
We have no self-interest. As a statement about this nation and its vision, we as a middle power should be leading the world in conflict resolution, in attempting to prevent and resolve crises and evolve the solutions thereafter. I think it is morally wrong for this nation to reduce that effort.
Senator Kenny: However, we have 52,000 effective personnel. How will you do it with that number?
LGen Dallaire: It is not how I will do it, sir, it is how this government will do it or not. This government has moved down this road of advancing our philosophy of life over the last decade or so. It has never articulated it as such. It has never expressed that vision. I speak to Canadian youth across the country about war-affected children. They are far more sensitive to this nation's role of responsibility in the world than we are. In my opinion, this nation has agreed that we are no longer in classic peacekeeping and we are not living in war in the classic sense, but we are in conflict areas and we will sustain casualties. We will have failures and we will have successes, but the aim is right. There is no more pure mission for a force or a diplomatic corps, except for defending one's nation, than to participate in the advancement of humanity as a whole.
The problem is not that we have 52,000 troops who will continue to be abused by continuing missions, it is the lack of recognition by the governing structures that the mission is right but the capabilities are burning out, and one day you will end up flat footed, with no capability to continue this position that the nation needs to take. That means that we will have a lot more casualties.
Senator Kenny: You are before a sympathetic forum and are being asked for solutions. I am waiting to hear you say you need to have 85,000, 75,000 100,000 personnel.
LGen Dallaire: I spoke in front of SCONDVA on the subject, and I made it quite clear that what is required now is not massive injections of money for equipment, but massive injections of money for troops — people. I indicated in my estimate a need for two full army brigades, or 10,000 troops, 3,000 to flesh out the current units and introduce six or seven new operational units that can be deployed, and 10,000 reservists to support the efforts of the regular force. In my opinion, that will meet the current level of demands. The question is how to solve the problem when you need troops and it can take up to four years to acquire them.
Senator Kenny: We understand that, General Dallaire.
Now, we have not seen any political will to do this. In the absence of a political will to do what you are suggesting, if we are going to stay at 52,000, what should the generals be saying to the politicians when they want to send the troops out again?
LGen Dallaire: Well, when Afghanistan came up, we should have said, ``Sorry.''
The Chairman: For the first time or second time?
LGen Dallaire: The second time — unless you pull out of Bosnia or somewhere else.
Senator Kenny: Do you think even pulling out of Bosnia would do it?
LGen Dallaire: If you take six months to redeploy, and I use six months, three months for readjusting, then with that level of troops, we could meet that; however, in none of these circumstances are the generals saying we can sustain any of that.
Senator Kenny: With the troops we have in Bosnia, nobody was saying we could send 2,000 people to Afghanistan. It just seems bizarre.
LGen Dallaire: Remember I mentioned that since 1964, we have been in an attrition battle. We are now at the point, or close to it, where either there is a defensive position taken or you are going to have a rout. In 1998, I commissioned five people, mostly academics, to conduct a study on quality of life, and in which Mr. Hyman was intimately involved. The question was not quality of life in the sense of the nuts and bolts of it; it was why are the generals not able to bring about the solutions? General-ship today in the Canadian Forces is like NDHQ-ship, because the generals are in the NDHQ. When you pooh-pooh NDHQ, you are pooh-poohing the general officer corps, and vice versa. Therefore I asked the question: How come we cannot advance in this? How come we cannot move? There is a ``cri du coeur'' from the troops. All these brown envelopes and all this stuff and an ombudsman and oversight committees — it is only because we did not permit the voice of the troops to come forward.
Two of them recommended that the solution is a union to negotiate. If you remember the judgment from the Supreme Court, I do not remember the name, troops can associate. It is legal for them to associate.
Senator Kenny: I am not going to go there, General Dallaire. This committee has recommended an increase to 75,000 troops. We have also recommended a two-year pause to get organized and reorganized. We do not see the government responding. If we are going to stay as a nation at this level, the answer has to be?
LGen Dallaire: The answer has to be that you will stop the missions.
Senator Kenny: Fewer troops going out.
LGen Dallaire: Yes.
Senator Kenny: Failing that, we are going to recklessly throw away endless lives?
LGen Dallaire: Lives not just though death, but through a substantial increase in injuries. Then you have a morally corrupt decision, because it is impossible morally for us to abdicate our responsibilities in the international community in regards to human rights and human beings. The onus, sir, is, of course, as you said in your report to the government, on the Canadian people. What do they want? Why are they not imposing their will on the government? Why are they not realigning? The other side of it is: Are the people in uniform assessing the problems with the focus on the complexities of now and into the future, or are we trying to hold the fort? I remember clearly that part of general-ship is to ensure that you are holding the fort and not getting rid of combat capabilities and so on. That defensive position has got us nothing from the governments of the past and certainly does not give any guarantee for the future.
Senator Kenny: It is a reversal of roles, but to answer your own question, sir, why is there not public support? Why does the public not respond to this? What are your views?
LGen Dallaire: My view in that regard is there is still a perspective among one group that peacekeeping is like the Cyprus experience. There is another perspective, whenever people see all the big equipment, acquisitions, things like that, that we are still forces in peace preparing for a third world war.
The third dimension is that within the structures of government, there is still a perspective that the Canadian Forces have moved more to being civil servants than war fighters or the defenders of the nation or the advancers of the nation in its international position. Those three components are making the position, maybe a solid defensive position, for the government, of saying if the pressure is not there, and there are so many others, let us do it. There were no Heres available to go to the Congo. There are not enough of them to sustain the forces we have deployed. We do not have the containment capability for 2,000 troops in Afghanistan. We just do not have that.
Senator Kenny: They are going, and nobody is saying no. Nobody is saying we cannot do that. Everybody is saying yes, we are going to get there.
LGen Dallaire: In the public domain, I suppose.
Senator Kenny: When is somebody going to step out and say this cannot happen? This is crazy?
LGen Dallaire: There was one general who did.
Senator Kenny: He went two months early?
LGen Dallaire: Well, a little more than that. There again, he got no press, nothing.
The Chairman: From your experience, General Dallaire, I think we all understand and know that somebody in uniform cannot voice an opinion contrary to political orders, but when asked, and when the discussions are in private, is it your view that the military spokespeople give the straight goods, so to speak, to the government, or are they overwhelmed by a feeling of, ``We are being asked to go, we had better go. Off we go''?
LGen Dallaire: They provide numerous options, including not going. I have participated in that.
Senator Kenny: Do they ever say, ``In a pig's eye''?
LGen Dallaire: It is the government's decision to take those options or not. May I bring you back to the 1990s, when the generals had an enormous lack of credibility and were attacked by every side, not just because of staff cars and the like, but over their ability to advance the plight of the soldiers and all of that circumstance. That is why two academics made that suggestion, because there was a perception that stuff was not getting across. Minister Young, in one of his first meetings with the senior generals, said, ``Gentlemen, I know that when you come to National Defence Headquarters you do not get lobotomies, but the perception out there is that you do.'' What do you do? How do you solve it? There have been reformists in the military, and there have been conservatives. The question is, is that how committees like this one are bringing out those dimensions and those tensions that exist and being able to influence the government subsequently? Advice is being given.
Let us go back to unification. I was a student at the marine staff college in 1980 in Virginia. One of the primary examples of general-ship that was used at the time was the 1968-69 ``ce sont les généraux qui ont quitté les forces.''
Senator Kenny: Admiral Landymore.
LGen Dallaire: There were 21 of them. It did not stop unification.
Senator Kenny: The message got out.
LGen Dallaire: The message got out. When I was in Rwanda, many people came to me and said, ``General, why do you not quit and tell the world about this situation?'' I said, ``How long will the value of a Canadian general be maintained in the international community after saying that?'' First of all, there are probably 50 people waiting to take my job. There are probably 50 people waiting to take those seniors' jobs. Secondly, I might get 15 seconds on CNN. Thirdly, am I helping the forces or my troops by abandoning them in the field to whomever? God knows, my replacement might be somebody better, but it might not be. The decision was not to quit in the field on the UN mission. The decision was to carry on and try to sustain it. That is an individual question that generals ask themselves.
Senator Atkins: I am sure you are aware of the testimony of Maj Henwood before this committee and the way he was treated when he was discharged. Can tell us how you were treated when you got your medical discharge and what compensation you received?
LGen Dallaire: Well, I was familiar with the Henwood case, because we worked on it. That became the focus of a lot of our work with Veterans Affairs, industry, the Legion and all the other players to try to eliminate the gap between people being in the service and all of a sudden being thrown to the wolves. There has been a lot of work done there. Maj Henwood did get a lot of support. He was the first case. General Barrie got personally involved when he was Commander of the Army. We were at the embryonic stage. We were learning. There were mistakes made.
When I was first released, I started to get therapy in 1996 because of the internal clashes. I was on therapy to varying degrees until I crashed totally in 1998. At that time, I had come from the international tribunal. I was the Assistant Deputy Minister of Human Resources, and other things. The CDS called and asked me if I needed a little leave. I said no, that I was just tired. They suggested that I take a month off to assess it. It took me over six months to be able to read just one line on a piece of paper. When I came back from Rwanda in 1994, I had three weeks leave after four weeks of war and genocide and twelve months overseas. I was given the job of Deputy Commander of the Army, of which I was proud. I was right in the middle of Somalia, plus the catastrophic reductions to the Canadian Forces, and the policy of my colleagues and my superiors at the time was, work hard, and with time it will go away. We just did not understand.
I had a battalion commander under my command when I commanded a brigade who had been in a major incident in the Middle East and won a medal of bravery. He ended up with serious alcohol problems, which I did not understand. Finally, we did subsequently release him.
After over six months on sick leave, I was brought back half-days, which I turned into full days. I was given a job separate from my original job to help me recuperate and to try to reintroduce me into the workplace. That did not work out and that is why I was medically released. I sought veterans' compensation through the Legion. I was trying in 1996, 1997, to test all of the systems. One of the ones I tested was the Legion. They help 15 per cent of all cases. I did get compensation, and it was reviewed, as cases normally are.
I still take therapy every three weeks. I am still on pills every day, and I not only see a psychologist every three weeks, but also a psychiatrist every two months or so, and that is only since I have been able to stabilize. It has been a continuum of need. I still remain suicidal at times. I was assessed by Veterans Affairs for my injury, post-traumatic stress syndrome, and received compensation from them while I was serving, which to me was totally foreign. I did not know it existed. I have been getting that compensation since 1998.
Senator Atkins: In your opinion, were they fair in how they dealt with you?
LGen Dallaire: The response was rapid. I had set the criterion that I did not want special help. I wanted to go through the system, and where things did not make any sense, influence them to change. By doing that personally, we were able to bring change. Now a psychological analysis is good, and not just a psychiatric analysis, because that was stalling a whole bunch of stuff.
There were procedures inside the NDHQ. The system was built for people who were healthy. When I got through the whole process of being released, I could not understand 10 per cent of it. Now they have case managers. We have now recognized that you cannot use a system for healthy people for people who are injured; you have to adapt it.
I got compensation for my son, who has been suffering directly because of the fact of my injury. I said to my eldest son, ``I am off, you are the man of the house; you take care.'' What happens when he finds out that his father is being shot at every day for four months? It starts to eat away at him and then there are subsequent reactions to that. I demanded that compensation be given for therapy for family members who are directly affected by the injury to the member. That could be physical or mental. Now it is on a case-by-case basis. It is not a full policy, so it is a half-step for us. That is how I proceeded with Veterans Affairs and the Legion. I cannot negate the fact that because of my rank, people wanted to respond rapidly. I had an independent check following me throughout to make sure that there was no ``passe-droit.''
The Chairman: Following on something you said to Senator Atkins about treatment, with any kind of injury, the recovery is greater if treatment is received at the earliest possible opportunity. Is there anything that you could suggest could be done so that we can treat injuries such as PTSD more quickly? For example, what if we had a team accompanying any deployment of people either medically trained or who have suffered the same injury and understand it, or if we had a SWAT squad that could deal with individuals who were diagnosed as suffering from this injury?
LGen Dallaire: The therapists have to get their boots dirty. They have to get into the field. They have to smell it, taste it, to vomit like the rest of them; having them there on an experiential basis, seeing the evolution in people — therapists, not just analysts — I think is crucial.
Second, the follow-up for PTSD is long term. It has been a long-term exercise for Maj Henwood; however, he has his prosthesis. Many cases seem eternal. Many cases appeared late. Out of the 12 officers who were deployed to me at the start of the war to replace the Belgians who had left, 10 are now under treatment for severe post-traumatic stress injury, some of them diagnosed as recently as six months ago, and it has been nine years.
The Chairman: One point you made in your paper is worth repeating, that it is a mistaken tradition to treat members of the Armed Forces like other public servants. This is where a lot of the difficulties arose during the hearings on Maj Henwood's case, because the insurance program was simply combined with one that was going into effect within the civil service. Would you agree with that statement, that members of the Armed Forces are a special case, and not civil servants in the classic sense, in terms of how their compensation and injury-related treatments should be dealt with?
LGen Dallaire: They are not civil servants by any definition. The parallel with the civil service came in the late 1960s, when many people were retiring without a cent in their pockets, with salaries that were of no value, but who had lots of ``quiffs'' while they were serving. When we made that parallel with the public service, it was an opportunity to get out of being treated as peacetime demobilized soldiers and as hired help. Blue-collar soldiers do not exist any more. The soldier is a soldier and not a public servant.
Senator Kenny: I think it is important to clarify for the record, by ``quiffs'' you are talking about fringe benefits, which could not be monetized for pension purposes, perhaps?
LGen Dallaire: That is right.
The public service has the ability and a union to advance their cause; that is the only reason for the links. It is not the compensation methodology that is preferred by the forces. It certainly was not when I was serving as Assistant Deputy Minister of Human Resources.
The Chairman: Finally, on a one-to-ten scale, ten being the best, what is your assessment of the degree of cooperation between the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of National Defence in treating the injuries we have been discussing today?
LGen Dallaire: It has gone from nonexistent to about a seven. We had a general as liaison officer in Veterans Affairs who made enormous changes. We no longer have a general; we have a lieutenant-colonel. That is why I say this crisis has not been solved. There should be a general in Veterans Affairs right now.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, General Dallaire, for your evidence today. I look forward to your next appearance before us.
The committee adjourned.