Thank you, Chair, and members of the committee.
Veterans Canada is Canada's largest dedicated veterans' organization, with over 8,000 members. It uses innovative software to shrink the vast geography of Canada so that veterans can come together in a virtual real-time community. However, such innovation is lost on Veterans Affairs Canada.
The department tenaciously clings to its version of stakeholders, individuals, or organizations whose members have little or no stake in VAC programs or will not meaningfully or publicly question a policy path that has been so damaging to veterans and their families over the past decade under the new Veterans Charter. Advisory groups operating clandestinely, while imposing fait accompli recommendations upon the veteran community, do not meet any standard of openness and transparency.
How do we get this right and fix the problems fuelling the unabated cry for help from veterans and their families? Parliament and Canadians endlessly profess that we owe our veterans a debt. It goes without saying that delaying Minister Hehr's mandate letter promises is a moral forfeiture of this debt. Of the 23 or so specific promises, only two have been fully implemented, and another partially. The promises are not enough.
The mandate letter requires the minister to be open to other priorities as they arise, but first and foremost to ensure a seamless transition of those releasing from the Canadian Forces. Seamless transitions require government and Canadians to make a tangible, innovative rehabilitation and re-establishment investment in our veterans and their families. Canada can lead the world in veteran rehabilitation. Mostly unemployed but not expendable, our most disabled veterans want a new-found sense of belonging and to make a contribution to Canada and Canadians. Let us help them do that through assertive community treatment, supported employment, and gradual work re-entry programs.
Neither should the most severely disabled and their families be relegated to the lowest income levels of a private, nor should they have their potential for income earning and productivity frozen for the rest of their lives. Canada must not accept this humiliating lifelong incarceration of veterans' potential. Meanwhile, the new Veterans Charter is a disincentive to work. It suppresses productivity and does little to encourage community belonging. If the most disabled veterans attempt to work, they will lose their earnings dollar for dollar through deduction to their income-loss program.
Furthermore, Veterans Affairs will not support educational upgrading for the most disabled, even though such lifelong self-improvement has been shown to enhance health outcomes and longevity and to reduce access to costly provincial health care programs, as well as other treatment programming.
These are not extraordinary requests. CPP disability allows recipients to earn up to $5,400 without deduction or declaration. The disability and rehabilitation plan that covers parliamentarians and other public servants allows recipients to work part time, pay into their pension, and not have any income offset up to 100% of previous full-time salary. Disabled veterans deserve to either continue paying into their retirement pension up until age 60, if necessary, whereupon they can collect a full pension, or have their income-loss program continue for life.
We do not have a universal post-secondary education plan for our veterans, even though just 17% of our regular force veteran population has a university degree and 43% only have high school equivalency.
Government professes the importance of family to serving and retired CF members, yet after more than 20 years of public appeals, government can't even give family members their own identification card, let alone a picture identification card to veterans. We have to wait another two years for a pilot project to end, in order for government to realize that all veterans' family members, not just those of recent release, need access to DND's grossly underfunded military families resource centres, an unsupportable situation in spite of the unprecedented appointment of a minister of veterans affairs as assistant deputy minister of national defence.
We invest hundreds of thousands of dollars, and even millions, to indoctrinate and train citizens to become a military member, but there has never been a single dollar put into a program to de-indoctrinate military members from the often harmful counter-productive effects of military culture.
The World War II Liberal government created what is widely considered the most successful and comprehensive rehabilitation and re-establishment program in the world. For the one million returning veterans, this was a true veterans' charter.
It was put together through truly comprehensive consultation. It was not constructed only by those who had a stake in the outcome, but involved the best expertise in rehabilitation, business, education, disability, and other fields. It is time for this government's promise of change to bring Veterans Affairs into the 21st century. Only then will we begin to repay the veterans in some more meaningful way than rhetoric, so that veterans can prosper alongside the Canadians whom they defend.
Thank you.