Veterans Affairs Committee on May 8th, 2007

[Darragh Mogan]

Maybe I'll comment.

I won't presume on the intentions of Dr. Marshall. Outside the Canada Health Act, in long-term care—which is not insured under the Canada Health Act, as such—there is variation in what provinces offer. Some offer more, some offer less, some offer different things. The goal of Veterans Affairs is to even that out, where we have to, especially in the area outside the Canada Health Act.

I don't know of any circumstance where veterans, just because they're veterans, are being disentitled or disenfranchised for anything that's offered by a province under the Canada Health Act. That I can say, categorically.

I do know that where Dr. Marshall and the Gerontological Advisory Council have advised creating a veterans integrated services program, there are going to be some provinces that offer a lot more than others, which has as much to do with the available provincial wealth I think as anything else.

But I don't think, from my experience, there is a province in this country that targets veterans for disentitlement. I really don't think that's so, and I don't think that's what Dr. Marshall meant.

[David Sweet, Conservative, Ancaster—Dundas—Flamborough—Westdale, ON]

This is a two-part question. Are there countries who have exemplarily high satisfaction ratios for their veterans care, and are we looking to those countries in this review so that we can benchmark against them and make this part of the resulting product?

[Brian Ferguson]

There are two aspects to a response. One is that we are well connected to a number of countries and we work continuously with them. In fact, the U.S., the U.K., New Zealand, Australia, and Canada have formed what is called the Senior International Forum. It's been operating for a number of years. We share information on best practices with each other on a continuing basis. In fact, I would say without hesitation that we cherry-picked from those countries many of the ideas that are in the new Veterans Charter. We will continue to work with them to look at ideas for improvement of our health services as part of the health services review.

We have instituted our own monitoring systems as well, though. As Darragh mentioned earlier, in our long-term care facilities, we monitor using a standard tool that is designed around 10 outcome areas that we insist be met for our veterans in these institutions. Our results are well up in the 90% range in terms of satisfaction at the moment.

We also run periodically through a common measurement tool, an independent assessment of the client satisfaction with us. We use that to try to improve where we see areas of deficits or whatever needs to be improved upon.

But I'll go back to your original question. Yes, we are looking with these countries. To pick one country that provides an exemplary service I think would be difficult, but everybody has strengths and weaknesses in different areas. We're trying to, again, use the same approach here.

Darragh, is there anything you'd like to add?

[Darragh Mogan]

If we want to characterize it, New Zealand, for instance, provides a very good case management service--that's what they do--and we've modelled our case management service along theirs. Our veterans independence program came in in 1981. The Australians have replicated it. They have a very good rehabilitation system there, as the British do, and we copied that, to the extent we could, in the new Veterans Charter.

[Brian Ferguson]

Our job placement program as well?

[Darragh Mogan]

Our job placement program is modelled on the British Ministry of Defence, so I think it's fair to say that that Senior International Forum provides us with a pretty good smorgasbord of things to choose from.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

Thank you very much, gentlemen.

Now on to Mr. Stoffer for five minutes.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Thank you again, Mr. Chairman.

I will just put a concluding aspect to my VIP crusade, as we say...still working with the widows and the veterans. They can only go by what they're being told, and what they were told by the now Prime Minister is that it would be immediately. The letter doesn't say there would be a review. It doesn't say we'd look at it. It doesn't say we would consciously think about it and we'll get back to you. It says immediately, and that's all I can go on.

If it sounds impatient, then it is, but the fact is these widows are getting older. They don't have much time. We'll lose about 40,000 Second World War and Korean War veterans this year. They'll leave behind...two-thirds of those will be widows, and most of them will not be eligible for VIP, and that is unacceptable in my term.

So I just put that one to rest right now. I know that's not for you, but if you can take it back to whomever and tell them to get their butt in gear on this one, it will be greatly appreciated, because it saves money. It saves money. The longer we wait, the more it costs us. If you do it for anything, do it for fiscal responsibility than for anything else.

My concern is Louise Richards. You probably saw her article in The Hill Times this week. I'm just wondering if you have an ability to respond to that, regarding her access to care at the Perley.

Also, we're getting a fair number of calls from across the country. There was one, a Harvey Friesen, which you're probably aware of, with asbestos. He was paid posthumously $100,000 for that. We're getting more and more people coming up, suffering from the effects of asbestosis, from their exposure to the ships and various buildings and plants they worked at during the forties and fifties, and that's coming back to haunt them now.

I'm just wondering what the department is doing in order to ascertain their concerns, to give the benefit of the doubt, to ensure that these aged civilians and veterans are able to be cared for as soon as possible.

[Brian Ferguson]

Perhaps I could ask my colleague.

Darragh, do you want to talk about the bed situation and I'll comment on the asbestos?

[Darragh Mogan]

Thank you, Brian.

We're aware of Ms. Richard's letter, her response to the minister's letter. I can't comment on the specifics, and you know I won't do that. What I can say is the issue was about the convalescent care beds at the Rideau-Perley centre and about whether veterans could have access to those beds, because they are on the civilian side of the hospital, and whether they could have access on a priority basis. The answer is, they are not part of the 250 priority access beds at the Rideau-Perley, but--and there's a big “but” here--if individuals, through a rehabilitation plan or for care of their war service-related injury, need convalescent care in the Rideau-Perley, in the Hotel Dieu Hospital in Kingston, in Nova Scotia somewhere--wherever they need it--we can pay for that and we will.

The reason we haven't had a reserve of convalescent beds there is because it tends to isolate the location of where this care can be received, and the downside of that is probably greater than the upside. The downside is it's only available to people in certain areas where we have these reserves of beds, and for the others, they have to move and leave their families to go to them. So if you can purchase the equivalent care somewhere in the community nearby for a war-related disability, it makes more policy sense. Our experience is that four out of five veterans would rather stay closer to home than they would to move a long way away.

I think that's probably the kind of policy...but we certainly understand Ms. Richard's concern there, and I don't know that the minister ever made a commitment that those were priority access beds, but they are available. If they need it, we can purchase the care.

[Brian Ferguson]

With respect to the asbestos issue, we are doing our best to ensure that generally veterans are aware of their rights to access the Department of Veterans Affairs for services, so that we have as much general outreach as we possibly can give to them within our communications strategy. For example, we have Salute! magazine, which goes out, admittedly, to existing veterans, not clients, but through that network there's a lot of interaction at Legion halls and things like that where people who are clients share that information and share the Salute! magazine. It gets well distributed across the country. We communicate in the Maple Leaf magazine, which is the internal magazine of DND.

So we attempt to make it known that for anybody who has any kind of illness that they think might be related to their military service, Veterans Affairs is there for them to come and see us.

When it comes to a specific illness and linking it back to the causal effect, we have thousands of maladies that could be attributable to military service, depending on what the circumstances were. It would be very difficult for us to go back and try to trace through history to find where people may have served and to highlight for them that they may have served in a particular area. It's a very complex subject, as I've learned in the last while as we've looked at this asbestos issue. But what we're doing is we are attempting to see what we can do in terms of communications on the subject, and we are looking at ways and means of enhancing that--I'll call it--outreach, to let people know that awards are being given for this particular substance and that we are there for them.

I don't know if that helps at all in terms of your questions.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Again, I go back to just the aspect of the “benefit of the doubt”. It's nice to say that, but I'll send you the hearing loss ones and the asbestos ones that I have for you to review. In my own case...and I'll correct myself if I'm wrong, but I don't see the benefit of the doubt being applied. I always see, “There's no link that shows you suffered a hearing loss, so you're denied.” That's what I'm seeing on my desk from these hearing concerns. I write them back and they say, “What about the benefit of the doubt?” That's fine, but unless there's a link to prove that their hearing loss was caused by those guns going off on the ships, we can't prove it. So there is my problem.

[Darragh Mogan]

We certainly want to see those. Benefit of the doubt works a certain way, and I don't want to pretend to be a lawyer, heaven forbid, but the benefit of the doubt means in the absence of any contradictory evidence, where the other legal proof is balance of probabilities, which is if six say yes and five say no, it's yes, and if six say no and five say yes, it's no. We don't have that, but the benefit of the doubt is not a vague term. It's quite a specific legal term.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

Thank you.

When Mr. Stoffer looked up before, that was actually when his time ran out, but I wasn't clear enough in terms of communicating it. Now the time is over to the Conservative Party, if there's anybody who wishes to get in five minutes worth of questions.

All right. Over to Monsieur Gaudet for five.

[Roger Gaudet, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

I have a brief question, Mr. Chairman.

To what services are veterans' widows and widowers entitled? What happens after their spouses die?

[Brian Ferguson]

Generally, there are two basic types.

One is that the widow or widower is entitled to a continuing pension if his or her spouse had been in receipt of a government pension from Veterans Affairs. A percentage of that pension would continue for the spouse. That's one benefit they receive.

Secondly, if the spouse was receiving the veterans independence program before he or she died, the widow or widower would be entitled to continue with whatever service the veteran was receiving, either groundskeeping or housekeeping, or both.

Those are the two benefits of spouses.

[Roger Gaudet, Bloc, Montcalm, QC]

Thank you, sir.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

Now, finally we go to Monsieur St. Denis.

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I have a fairly short question. I'd like to follow up with something my colleague, Mr. Valley, was pursuing. It was some evidence we heard from a physician with the military in relation to post-traumatic stress disorder, part of the overall health review.

If I understood correctly, less than 10 years ago, after many complaints by former military and studies by the then defence and veterans affairs committee, it was ultimately decided by the government that something should be done for injuries at work, much as you see in the civilian world with provincial compensation programs. So an attempt was made more or less to mirror that for our military—none of us, I'm sure, would disagree with that notion—and at the same time, by providing military personnel with access to disability benefits while they're still in the service, to encourage them to come forward rather than to hide injuries for fear of being let go. So there were certainly a lot of positive benefits there.

I think the point of the testimony was that with that came a lot of extra demand on the medical resources of the military. Whereas they wouldn't have been concerned about the paperwork and the processing of a disability-type claim on top of the regular medical services to the military, they now had the two. I think the issue, then, was human resources in the medical field to deal with this.

Is your review going to deal, among many other questions, with that particular question?

[Brian Ferguson]

In actual fact, we're dealing with it through another mechanism. I don't think it's a fundamental, transformational item for the review, although it's an extremely important issue for us. In other words, we have an ongoing relationship with the Department of National Defence. We meet quarterly with the senior management cadre, on to the chief of military personnel, and under the veterans services side of our house we meet constantly. One of the areas we're continually working on is to try to speed up the process of the paper flow from DND through to Veterans Affairs Canada for disability benefits and for other reasons. That issue is on the radar screen. It's one we're continuing to work with.

We realize that the issue—and we were informed and educated by DND along the same lines some time ago—is that their physicians are there to help their military members deal with problems. That's job one. Job two of providing input to the Veterans Affairs disability award process is one in which they were having difficulty meeting the workload demand.

We have introduced some changes to this to try to improve that system, and we're actually seeing quite significant improvements in turnaround times. We've offered resources to them to help find the people who can actually deal with those awards.

One of the things we're doing is actually accepting the military evidence as being the basis for our disability award program, so as not to create a second requirement. Subject to privacy concerns about whatever the CF member may have relative to that, we're able to use that document.

So there are improvements under way in that area. I see it as something we should be doing anyway, and not something we should be waiting for the veterans health services review to fix for us.

[Brent St. Denis, Liberal, Algoma—Manitoulin—Kapuskasing, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

And finally, Mrs. Hinton had an interjection.

[Betty Hinton, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

I have a bit of a question here. You just said that if they were entitled to a continuing pension, it continues. If the veteran was on the veterans independence program, it continues for the spouse.

A problem that I've had for many years, and I've said this repeatedly, is that the veterans of World War II and the Korean War are a different breed. They are extremely independent, very self-sufficient. In many cases, they have refused to have that kind of support. They don't want someone to shovel their driveway. They don't want their windows cleaned. They don't want their lawn mowed. Then one day they're shovelling their driveway and they have a heart attack and die, and now the widow is unable to have the continuing service. That's one thing I would like to see addressed. That is the whole issue here. If they were not on the VIP program prior to dying, the widow is not entitled. I just wanted to make sure that was clear.

You've answered this before, because I've been at committees in areas where you've said this. Who is entitled to the VIP program? They have to be a serving veteran who was in a battle. Is that correct?

[Brian Ferguson]

That's not entirely—

[Betty Hinton, Conservative, Kamloops—Thompson—Cariboo, BC]

Okay, I didn't think so.