Every province keeps health utilization data. At the research team I lead, we just found the veterans' identifier in the Ontario health utilization data. That's part of a big data set that Stats Canada links with a bunch of different sources. We were able to show that veterans in their first five years post-release are higher users of the health system for all reasons, and separately for mental health reasons, than the general population.
We were also able to show that young male veterans—we have 26-year-old veterans—are more likely to use an emergency department for a mental health crisis than age-matched controls. We are just starting to learn about some of the data, so we don't know why. Epidemiology tells you what, not why, but it's important to know that. We've never known that in Canada before, but they have different needs. We know that veterans who are released when they're older tend to have higher rates of diabetes over time, and we don't know why.
All those things are important to track. They've had different lives, different exposures, and when we say veterans, the veterans' identifier also included RCMP veterans until they went under the provincial system a few years ago, because when you release, you don't have the three-month interprovincial wait to get a health card.