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.