Thank you so much.
Good morning. Thank you for having me here today. I'm in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia.
I am the executive director of the Esquimalt Military Family Resource Centre, and I've worked in military family services programs for 23 years.
I'll give you a bit of background about military family resource centres.
A lot of people don't realize that we are not-for-profit societies. There are 32 such centres across Canada, and we are all specialists and subject matter experts in the military family lifestyle. We receive some funding from the Canadian Forces morale and welfare organization, and we also receive funding from the local base for what we call site-specific services. I'm telling you that is because later on I will talk to you a little about some of our mental health services that are supported by CFB Esquimalt.
We have the ability as not-for-profits to fundraise, to apply for grants and to charge user fees for things such as day care to meet our budget requirements.
Military family lifestyle is unique and involves frequent and unpredictable geographic relocations. It involves the endurance on the home front of military members who head away for long missions and deployments and their exposure to risk. As we are also learning this morning, it's about families dealing with operational stress injuries.
In terms of that and in terms of our mental health services towards families, we offer a variety of programs and services. I'll briefly go over those for you.
We offer counselling. During the pandemic, we have moved to a virtual platform for our counselling services, but I'm sure you can understand that when we have cases of interpersonal violence in the home, we have created opportunities for people to meet with our counsellors in person, following all the appropriate COVID protocols. That's very important, because in some households it's impossible for a family member to receive counselling support when the military member or other family member is around. This has also proven to be something for the youth we support, who are often more comfortable going for a coffee or a walk. Again, this has been somewhat of a challenge during the pandemic, but we have been able to create appropriate protocols so that we can work with those folks.
Part of the work that we also do is preventive. That would be facilitating groups and workshops that relate to things such as parenting, maintaining wellness and relationship issues.
We're just about to launch into return-and-reunion workshops. We have a ship returning after six months away, with 220 members on board. We'll be working with their families to help to integrate that military member back into the household and to talk about things such as operational stress injuries and how they can support their families as they return back into their homes and into their communities.
We're also very fortunate to be able to offer specialized services, and this refers to my previous comment that we receive funding from our base commander. These would be services such as therapeutic play for children and youth, as well as navigation services. I'm sure you can imagine how it feels for families who have a child who is on a wait-list for exceptional needs when they finally get to the top and then have to relocate again. We're doing some work on harmonizing those wait-lists across provinces. Our staff also help people navigate the local services so they can integrate quickly and get the help they need for themselves and for their families.
We have a strong partnership with base mental health services, and this is very important, because families are complex. When we see them, we're not just seeing the family members; we're seeing the military member as well, and providing wraparound service. It's very important for us, with the appropriate confidentiality agreements in place, to have a close working relationship with base mental health as well as close working relationships with partners in the community, so that we can make meaningful referrals for families who are experiencing issues that are a little beyond our scope.
The Canadian Armed Forces has a construct called a transition centre. This is for members who are ill and injured. We have a counsellor who is co-located there. The purpose is to support families who are dealing with an injury, including an operational injury. Sometimes it can be an illness.
What they do in this unit is work with the military members. We work with the families, with the ultimate goal that the member might be transitioning out of the Canadian Armed Forces due to an illness or injury or might be needing some specialized care in order to get back to duty. We engage very heavily in this centre with military members, as well as with families, to create what we hope is a healthy transition.
What happens then is that the member gets passed along to our veteran family program coordinator, who works with families of veterans to assist with that very difficult transition, especially when it's a transition that was unpredictable due to a member's illness or injury.
I want to speak to you for a few minutes about some of the things that concern families when it comes to accessing mental health care for their military member.
One of the things we have certainly experienced is that at CFB Esquimalt, and I think at many bases across the country, there is a lack of mental health care after hours. During the day, if a military member is having any health issues, including mental health issues, they go through the clinic system, although there are some barriers to that for those members. Our big concern is when the office is closed down and it's after hours. Then organizations like ours, the chaplain team and the military police become the go-to resources under those circumstances. It almost seems inevitable that once a military member goes home, in the evening or over the weekend is when they or their family will reach out for help and support.
As I mentioned, I've been in this program for about 23 years. Previously, there was always a mental health professional from the base on call and ready for those after-hours emergencies. We have, in Ottawa, as part of military family services, a family information line that includes virtual counselling. The problem is that there is a lack of understanding of the local communities and how to support somebody over the telephone when there is a crisis under way.
I would have to say kudos to our chaplain teams, who are the ones taking those after-hours calls. I hope at some point that the committee gets the opportunity to speak with a member from the chaplain team to begin to understand the unique pressures that they experience in terms of caring for families and military members.
The other issue that has concerned us in the past is that our military police force are not, in British Columbia, able to transport someone under the Mental Health Act. They're deemed not to have the proper credentials that the city or municipal police might have. What we've experienced, for example, is that a member might come through our doors with thoughts, for example, of suicidality. The military police are limited in terms of negotiating with that person, getting them into their vehicle and getting them to appropriate care, whether that's at the base hospital or at our local hospital in the psychiatric unit.
It's heavy negotiation for somebody who is already in an extreme situation. Oftentimes we find we have to divert ourselves to the municipal police or ambulance which, of course, adds to the trauma. Our goal is to be providing trauma-informed care, and we find this does undermine that.
We often get some assistance from the chaplain team and chain of command for those things, but I think that relates to the previous testimony that we just heard: that it can be a very bureaucratic and a traumatizing experience for a military member who is undergoing mental health issues.
Thank you.