Thank you very much for the question. It's absolutely one that's important to be asked.
With a great deal of frustration, in some cases desperation, our day-to-day job for the last six months has been helping veterans with mental health issues. Already throughout the process and the fall of Afghanistan we saw the impact of that on their mental health, on their well-being, to the point where we brought together our clinical network from across Canada to do some additional training and consultation on this, because the topic was coming up again and again in the programs that we continue to run.
How specifically does the issue of interpreters impact veterans? It impacts them right at home, because the interpreters are reaching out to Canadian Forces veterans asking them for help, asking them to help them with their applications, to help provide letters of reference so that they can be vetted and approved to come to Canada.
In many cases they are also providing them with funding. They're helping them to book travel plans. They're giving them their own money to pay for their temporary accommodations whether that's in Kabul or Pakistan, or somewhere else on their journey to Canada. This is impacting them enormously.
I'll give one example. We have a veteran who's been a long-time supporter of our organization. His name is Trevor Street. He lives in British Columbia. He spent tens of thousands of dollars of his own money in July to take out ad campaigns in newspapers in Ottawa with a photo of his interpreter, who was killed by the Taliban, asking why a program has not been announced. That was in July.
We see examples like that all across Canada. We have spoken to dozens of veterans over the previous months who have had some deep level of involvement helping their personal interpreters.
It is incredibly detrimental to the mental health of Canada's veterans to not be able to help them and to see them still waiting to come here when the veterans are getting messages daily talking about how dangerous it is.