Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you for the question about the funding for the program and its ability to expand into Quebec. You are correct. We started with funding from the Royal Canadian Legion in B.C., and then we expanded nationally with help from the Dominion Command of the Royal Canadian Legion, represented here today, with $500,000 that coincided with the federal government's funding.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, I think the additional funding from True Patriot Love will meet the need to deliver it in French. The ongoing funding requirement and the agreement we have with the government is that they will pay per client. We will need the ongoing support. All indications are positive that will continue for Veterans Affairs.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you, everyone, for having me here. I appreciate that the government is taking the time to review the new Veterans Charter. In my position as the executive director of the Veterans Transition Network, as a veteran myself who served in Afghanistan, and somebody who's gone through some of the operational stress injuries and come out the other side of the system, there are definitely some improvements that could be made along the way.

National Defence committee  We talk about costs. The competitive advantage for our organization is that we have all those costs covered by the private sector currently. Because we were a trial and we were experimental, and we were seeing what the data was going to present, the legion got behind it, and we were able to spend all that money from the private sector building our capacity.

National Defence committee  Not currently, but we're always open to that possibility. Our business plan has been successful so that we have this growth capital from the private sector. If something goes off course in a couple of years' time we could re-evaluate that. We do have an application in front of DND right now to become a service provider to them.

National Defence committee  To date, Veterans Affairs has funded eight personnel to come through the program. For DND, again, we're still in negotiations with their health services teams on that.

National Defence committee  I'm not sure on any specifics. I think funding is obviously the big issue with DND. They're talking about supporting our program in principle, and I'm sure, with budget cuts as they are, that everyone is starting to ask where the money is going to come from. I would say a good place for our program is the delivery of services to veteran populations: get them early; get them on track; get them back into careers.

National Defence committee  I'd be happy to.

National Defence committee  Our objective is 150 veterans per year on an ongoing basis after 2015.

National Defence committee  Right now we are funding our growth capital to hire more staff. We want to have zone coordinators in five zones across the country, including our headquarters staff and those are the administrative support teams. Clinicians are really our bottleneck, the people who are trying to train up to deliver this program.

National Defence committee  There are some programs that I can talk about, but I'm not fully qualified to speak on them completely. I can relate as well that my father served his whole career in the police force and made that transition himself recently. I'd say in the current service model they have a lot of programs for the most extreme cases with mental health.

National Defence committee  I think it's a great point. To give you a bit of an update, and not too pre-emptively, we have been in very good conversations with DND to date. We've talked to people from mental health. They realize that our program doesn't fit within the health services bracket, that we are in some other more psychosocial capacity, and that perhaps the home for an organization like ours and others could be in the JPSUs, where we're not helping necessarily an injured population, but we are helping people with that transition.

National Defence committee  That 400 number is back-ended. For the first 12 years or so, we were only running this as a research project. It was very small scale. We've been ramping this up. We want to get it to 150 military and veteran personnel per year in 2015. Currently we are a non-profit organization.

National Defence committee  It's really the key indicator for us, if they can get back into employment. The real difference, though, is not just a job, but a fulfilling job. We don't think the major problem facing veterans is unemployment; it's actually underemployment. I can speak first-hand to this after coming out of Afghanistan, where I was in charge of 30 people's lives and millions of dollars' worth of equipment.

National Defence committee  I don't think we've come up with any sort of data to show a best time for it. I took it earlier on. It was the first exposure I had to anything therapeutic, and I found that extremely helpful. We do find that we're catching people further upstream. We know if they're able to make a successful transition, if they're able to find a place for themselves emotionally and vocationally in the civilian sector, that is hugely beneficial to reducing the chance of their developing post-traumatic stress or some other sort of disorder or landing in jail and having ongoing transition problems.