Hon. Roméo Antonius Dallaire:

Honourable senators, I want to draw to your attention a conference that was held a few weeks ago regarding the creation of the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research. This institute was created to meet the mental health needs of our veterans and their families. Before 1997, Canada had only a small clinic that took care of wounded soldiers and has had no research entity since the Korean War. There was a growing risk that we would never have an entity to conduct research on wounded soldiers and their families, and that we could also end up without any research to anticipate potential psychological wounds, reduce their impact in a theatre of operations and see how to fix the problem, by caring for soldiers and their families when the soldiers are wounded.

A Canada-wide network of several universities was formed to create this institute. It was founded by Queen's University and the Royal Military College in Kingston. Participating university members include the University of Alberta, Dalhousie University, the University of Calgary, Université Laval, the University of Manitoba, Memorial University, Mount Saint Vincent University, the Université de Moncton, the University of New Brunswick, the University of Ottawa, the University of Prince Edward Island, the University of Regina, Ryerson University and the University of Western Ontario.

We are expecting the University of Sherbrooke to soon also join in the fray of attempting to bring this to Canada, which is the only country in NATO that has absolutely no research capability on mental injuries that are incurred by soldiers through operations and the impact on their families.

I would like to share some statistics that I consider to be essential in this matter.

The forum with the second one now bringing a more mature evolution of the work, indicated and advocated that more life after service studies include all veterans, not just those who become Veterans Canada clients. To date, research on adjusting to civilian life after leaving the Canadian Forces suggests that 65 per cent have an easy transition and 25 per cent have a difficult transition. Furthermore, 75 per cent of those medically released from the Canadian Forces become Veterans Canada clients, and male veterans have a suicide rate 1.5 times that of the general population.

Honourable senators, I will end by saying that not only are these universities engaged and committing research funds, but also Veterans Canada and National Defence have joined fully and are preparing funding to support this initiative. This has been long in coming and certainly will prevent casualties in the future.

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