The federal government announced last week that it will work more aggressively to prevent suicides among Canadian Armed Forces service members and veterans. It was a timely announcement, but short on substance about a pressing and complex issue.
An ongoing Globe and Mail investigation has found that 70 Canadian military members who were deployed in Afghanistan killed themselves after returning home. Another six took their lives while deployed.
Of the 70, 31 suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression or another mental illness connected to their time in a combat zone.
The goal of the new strategy is to ensure that military personnel with physical and mental wounds face as few obstacles to services as possible, and that those still in uniform can reveal their struggles without risking their careers.
Will it work? It's a start. The very fact that the departments of National Defence and Veterans' Affairs, along with General Jonathan Vance, the chief of the defence staff, are talking so publicly about mental-health issues is important, because it reduces stigma.
The Trudeau government also seems prepared to spend money. It especially loves to tout the fact that it has re-opened nine VA offices closed in 2013-14 by the Harper government.
But most of what the government delivered last week was a wordy enumeration of existing services and programs, some added since the last election, padded out by promises about "working groups" to improve communications, possible new training programs, and abstract plans to examine the potential effectiveness of untried prevention measures.
Preventing suicide is complex, no question, but past efforts were clearly inadequate. By the same token, programs and services added in the last year are too new to be judged effective, and the rest don't exist yet.
In the meantime, Otawa continues to toy with the idea of deploying troops to hotspots such as Mali, where a dangerous United Nations counter-terrorism effort is under way.
The real measure of the efforts announced last week will come in the years ahead, and the metric will be simple: fewer military personnel and veterans taking their own lives. Anything else will be remembered as merely public relations.