National Defence Committee on June 3rd, 2013

[Paul Franklin]

They bought both, actually.

The first wheelchair arrived, and I waited and waited. I did my rehab and all this stuff. It was only about four weeks. Shoppers Home Health Care was asking where their cheque was, or at least a valuation that we're going to pay. Veterans Affairs told them they were not going to pay, and then DND, being the bureaucracy it is...there was no one to report to and ask for these cheques.

Eventually the salesman just said “I have to take the chair back, and hopefully this will impose a quicker transition from you getting the chair to me getting the cheque.” I said “Okay, no worries.” Then I told my CO, and from that point a cheque was written from the hospital emergency fund and the wheelchair was given back to me.

In this latest one, I got a new wheelchair. I went to Shoppers Home Health Care, and because I didn't follow the specific rules of Veterans Affairs, which is to talk to the occupational nurse to get your seat and your back measured, and all the rest of the stuff, because I didn't follow those rules—and I understand, but the salesman knows me, he has those measurements on file, and we deal with this stuff. I don't know, I talk to the dude on a monthly basis. So everything is there. I have a huge-ass file like that. It's all there, it's easy to do, but the problem is that Veterans Affairs doesn't trust the salesman.

It all has to do with trust and how they don't trust the client or the salesman. Anyone outside the system is not a trustworthy person, even though we could fill libraries with the number of honourable things we've done in this society. But that's the stuff we can't get these people through. That's why I actually had to go through a comic to get this done. I purposely went a little outside the box. I could have done it a little quicker, but I decided to go this route because it is literally so absurd, and being one of the more visible people, as an amputee and as a wounded soldier, I thought it would be completely classic that this is the route I would have to take.

Imagine someone with PTSD, alcoholism, a family member locked up in a psychiatric ward, or you name it. That is the true problem. I like to call it the sit and die program. They wait for you to die because it's cheaper. Remember, back in the day they said death is cheaper than a wound, and it's true. That standard is still held to this day.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

I'm going to have to wind it down. We're way over time.

Mr. Chisu, we're going to go to five minutes, so be sure you keep your comments to that.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much, Master Corporal Franklin and Master Corporal Mitic, for being with us today and for telling your stories.

I completely agree with you about the bureaucracy. As a retired member of the forces, and I was in Afghanistan in January 2007 with Roto 3, I understand the issues and the things you are going through and the bureaucracy you are facing. I faced bureaucracy, imagine, at the officer level, and now we are facing you, at your level.

I would like to ask you a couple of questions. You retired from the forces, and you are just in the process of retiring. How do the forces prepare you for your retirement? When I retired from the forces, and I was forced to retire because of the age limit and so on, it was one of the saddest days of my life.

To go from every day on the job in the military and now you are going into a completely different world...how do you think you are prepared for that? I'm not speaking about the services from Veterans Affairs, because you are able-bodied and you want to do something; you are young and you want to participate in society. How is DND or the army preparing you for this transition?

How were you prepared, and how are you getting prepared?

[MCpl Jody Mitic]

For me, I've looked at the services. SISIP has services, and DND has services. My personal feeling is that it's actually really good. There's a lot in terms of retraining, for example.

Being a combat soldier, I have a little bit more available, because there's not much of a market for a sniper in the world—unless you're a cop or a mercenary.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[MCpl Jody Mitic]

You know, Libya was hiring for a while, but that ended.

You can go to university, or if you're a clerk or a mechanic, they will pay for your upgrade to be certified on the civilian side. If you're a medic, they'll send you to paramedic school, or maybe nursing school, if you can get some of the qualifications on your own.

I've said on a few occasions that there are almost too many options on how to prepare yourself to leave. For me, my biggest hurdle was accepting that I wasn't a soldier anymore. But that was a personal thing.

As far as the services are concerned, I've seen lots of soldiers leave the military and get jobs outside the military, no problem. I think they do their best.

You know, it's one of those things; this is one of those cases where everyone is different, but they have a lot of options for you to choose from.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

So you are satisfied with the services, essentially.

[MCpl Jody Mitic]

I'm not using any of them, because I'm going down a route where I've made my own path, which is my choice. If I wanted to, though, there are plenty of options for me to find a way out.

So it's good. For a lot of soldiers, as I said, you wake up one day, you're told where to be, what time to be there, what to wear, when you're going to eat, what to bring, and the next day it's like, “Okay, see you later, fella.”

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Mr. Franklin.

[Paul Franklin]

I did the same thing; I chose a different path from what was offered.

There are programs out there. One of the newer ones is Helmets to Hardhats. That's great, but after sleeping in the forest for months and years, do you really want to go and work in the oil sands? Like, no. I'd rather work at a bank, thanks, and be sitting at a job.

But this is if I were even able to do it, which is part of the problem. As a paramedic, I was fully trained and fully capable of doing my job. After being blown up, I can't serve in any provincial paramedic force, or even instruct, because I can't get my paramedic licence. I can't go in the back of a car where I can see patients. Now I'm in kind of a quandary, because all my seven years of education are tossed out the door. I have to recreate my own self.

There is this problem, then. The wounded and injured/ill have an issue of where they can go, based on their training. This small group of people of I guess probably 5,000 who are wounded—just the wounded—we have an issue with. We have to find a place for them. With PTSD, we then have to add an extra probably 40,000 to that group.

These are huge numbers, when you actually start to think about it, to integrate back into society within a six-year period. We started in 2002, and now here we are in 2013-14. We've had about six years of people slowly returning, and then, in probably three years, people retiring from that timeline. We'll have another three years of that next group retiring because they can't serve anymore. With universality of service, you only have three years.

So we have this huge group within society that is marketable, intelligent, educated, and cannot be employed. That's a big issue. We have to figure out how to do that.

I will refer back to the family issue. What we're not doing is we're not training the families before deployment. What we're not doing is we're not talking to those families and telling them what to expect and what to do.

We all signed up. We know what bureaucracy is. You're here; you know what it is. This is not an expectation that DND would screw us. It's standard; it's that level of care; it's as low....

As I was saying, the highest level of care in the world; well, when you're at the bottom, it's easy to be the highest. When Afghanistan went from the worst country in the world to the third worst, for them it was a massive step. But the reality is that you still have a hard life there, dude, because you're only going to live to 45.

That's the kind of thing where we have to think about what we're doing. It's not about spending more money; it's about employing the ideas we already have, making them simpler to understand, making them more flexible.

Why do I have to pay beforehand for so many of these things, as Jody is doing with his house, as I'm going to be doing with my kitchen? I have to cough that money up first and then get it done after. It all comes out of this hole, which will be a line of credit or extra mortgage or whatever.

I'm running two homes right now, the house I have with my ex and then this house. I'm helping with that, and then I'm doing this thing. And this is not unheard of. I mean, 90% of wounded soldiers are divorced. We're all separated from different places and families, so we all have this huge issue.

Then, of course, you add all the family matters. They don't understand what we're going through.

Jody and I, we don't really have PTSD. All it is, post-traumatic stress disorder, is a normal reaction to a very abnormal situation. We worked through those steps to get out to the other side. Then we fought through the system, and we fought the way we fight as combat people to get to the other side.

Maybe we come at it from a bit of a different perspective than other people do. That's just an idea.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Time has expired. We're going to move on.

Madame Moore.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Can you hear me?

[MCpl Jody Mitic]

Yes.

[Christine Moore, NDP, Abitibi—Témiscamingue, QC]

Mr. Franklin may be in a better position to answer my first question.

Two or three years ago, a friend of mine had a mining accident. He was a military reservist, and his civilian job was working in a mine. He lost the use of his legs after falling in a mine. Now he gets around in a wheelchair. He lives with his spouse. Since the accident occurred in the mine, the CSST handled all the home adaptation and the other costs.

Have there been any comparisons between what is available to members of the military and what is available to civilians, through worker's compensation, for example, when people have had an injury, an amputation or a serious injury?

Mr. Mitic, do you have a specific claims adjudicator, in other words, a single person who walks you though the entire process and helps you fill out adaptation requests? Does anyone look after you in that way? If not, do you think it would be a good idea to have an officer looking after an injured person's individual case? The officer could assist the individual with all the paperwork and applications, give them an overview of the situation and take steps on the person's behalf so he or she doesn't miss anything?

You were a sniper. Going through the binders of documents describing all the programs may not be your specialty.

If it doesn't already exist, do you think such a system should be established to ease the burden on members of the military who have to go through administrative steps?

[MCpl Jody Mitic]

You can do the WSIB thing.

[Paul Franklin]

Yes, sure. I've talked to other insurance groups and the workers' compensation board, through the charity issues and how people are compensated.

SISIP offers a value for your limb, but it's not the same value that a typical insurance agency would offer. It's $125,000 per limb, up to a maximum of $250,000. Billy Kerr lost three limbs, so he doesn't get any more money, even though his quality of life is down to minimum because of three limbs lost. Other people get the same amount of money for having much smaller injuries. We have a guy who is surviving and doing amazingly well, yet he's not compensated the same.

If it's below the knee, an insurance company may pay $125,000; for above the knee, $150,000 to $200,000; or at the hip, maybe $250,000. The reason for that is because of the lack of mobility. As you saw, Jody walked in. He is a double below-the-knee amputee. As a double above-the-knee amputee, I hardly walk. The difference in mobility and effort is a thousandfold. I don't ask for 1,000% more, just simply a different percentage, which workers' compensation, insurance companies, and others do quite regularly.

As for case managers, they exist. It's always funny when you go into a Veterans Affairs office, because the clerk is behind—literally—bullet-proof glass. You can imagine that already the level of confrontation is up. It's like asking for money at the airport; it's just stupid. You have to get through that level to even talk to someone.

Again, we go back to that initial piece. Imagine someone who is confrontational, who has a drinking problem, and who has all those other issues. To even see their case manager.... They finally get downtown, they finally get to the Veterans Affairs office, or the family does, they finally get to see someone, and it's like, “Do you want fries with that?” It's not cool. It's not the best way to have Veterans Affairs represented, and it's not the best way for the families and others to get care.

That's the key. Even for the programs that exist now, how can we give people better access to the system so that someone like Jody, who is going through this lawyer stuff, should not have to pay for a single lawyer, ever, especially when it's a DND-created problem. We should have a DND lawyer who represents DND, and we should have a DND lawyer—which we actually have, called JAG—represent both clients, just as they normally do in any other harassment or any other DND issue. They should talk together, come up with the problem, and Jody gets his solution, which should be that there's not a single cent paid if it's been an administrative mistake on anyone's part.

[MCpl Jody Mitic]

That would be nice.

For serving, the JPSU is your agent. So if you're posted to JPSU, there is the services manager in charge of the platoon. They still use military jargon, so everyone is assigned a section commander. A normal section commander—in the infantry, anyway—will have a section of 10, if you are mechanized, which means that if you're in vehicles you'll have a 10-man crew.

I've heard of JPSU section commanders looking after 75 soldiers. These guys and girls do good work. They do their best to stay on top of things, but a lot of the time the section commanders within the JPSU, as well as the officers and the commanders of these units, are themselves injured or ill, or approaching retirement, or they're on a class B contract from the reserves, and when that expires they then leave the job. So there is constant turnover of personnel in these units. Just as they're getting good at it, oftentimes that's when their contract is done or they're offered another job. Frankly, I don't blame them when they jump ship, because they deal with a lot of stuff. I don't know if $65,000 a year is worth dealing with the problems of 100 different people on a daily basis. That's what the JPSU is created to do.

They didn't have it when I was first injured, and I made a point of saying it would be nice to have, and they said, “Oh, don't worry. In about a year we'll have this system in place.”

They're doing their best with what they have, though.

[The Chair, Conservative, James Bezan]

Thank you.

Time has expired, and the time for our meeting has expired as well.

I want to thank you, Master Corporal Franklin and Master Corporal Mitic, for joining us today and giving your comments and sharing with us your experience. I want to thank you for the sacrifice you made for your country, and also for the service you do today for your country in helping us with our study.

This is important work, and we hope with the report we come out with at the end, the government will help improve on some of the hurdles you've encountered and the services you're being provided.

With that, thank you very much.

We are adjourned.