Veterans Affairs Committee on June 17th, 2008

[Rick Barker]

There are two points to your question. New Zealand is in the process of making a transition. Up to the previous president of the RSA, all prior presidents were Second World War veterans. The last two were Vietnam War veterans. Even they say we need to be looking to the next generation of veterans to lead the organization, because the issues are more intense and complex, and they have to spend more time on the job.

New Zealand has RSA outposts in almost every town, and each RSA will have a welfare officer to whom the returned servicemen and women can go if they have issues about welfare. They will be about how they work in the home, those with respect to the War Pensions Act, and so on. I will help them with those.

So we're going to provide support, training, and other things to the welfare officers in the RSAs across New Zealand, in addition to the services we provide. They will see the people in their communities, know them, and have relationships with them that the state institutions, like Veterans' Affairs and others, won't have. They will be the best people to lead them to assistance.

We want to work with the RSA to make sure they have very good networks bringing the people in who need assistance, particularly with PTSD and so on. We want to help people and get them on side to help us help them.

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

On the agreement that the RSA--or in our case the legion--infrastructure in the social economy is worth supporting and complementing for the next generation, I don't know if the presidents of our dominion commands have served beyond the Second World War, but that would be helpful to know.

With that, Minister, thank you very much.

[Rick Barker]

You talked about lowering the bar, and I'll give you a very good reason why you should have a lower bar for those who have served than for those who haven't.

The perfect example for me is the Gulf War and what people identify as the Gulf War syndrome. The Americans have spent millions of dollars trying to research what the Gulf War syndrome is, and they have no idea what it is. They accept that people who have Gulf War syndrome are sick, and they take care of them.

If you had a normal standard of proof for people who went to war, you would not be able to help people who had Gulf War syndrome because you could not identify an accident, a cause, and a consequence. So I think having a lower threshold for those who have served in an area of conflict is absolutely essential.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

Thank you.

Now we'll move to the Conservative Party of Canada and Mr. Shipley for five minutes.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Minister and your staff, for being with us in your morning and our afternoon for the study and analysis of what we're doing across veterans affairs departments.

I'll list three or four questions and let you respond to them.

You talked about information not being collected or handed out well. I'm assuming you're talking about some of the medical and personnel records that come from Defence that shift across the line when people become veterans. I'm wondering what you might be thinking about as future solutions.

Secondly, in Canada--and we have found this in discussions with other countries--there's the issue of red tape and the complexity of the forms individuals have to fill out when they need benefits or services. We're still looking for ways to simplify them and yet be efficient and effective. If you can give us some help on that, it would be wonderful.

You've included a very short version of a budget with some explanatory notes. We've asked Michel, our analyst researcher, to help out through the summer by comparing budgets of different countries. This will benefit not just us, obviously. Things have to work both ways. Hopefully other countries will benefit, as we do some sort of analysis of budgets on a comparative basis of services supplied, dollars spent, efficiencies, and those types of things.

I would like to be able to thank you in advance. Hopefully we can generate some information from you and return some information to you.

Finally, you mentioned that you have cemeteries. I'm wondering about the services provided and how long you have provided them.

There are a number of things there, but I would appreciate your response. Thank you.

[Rick Barker]

Thank you.

On the information, I'll ask Fiona to respond. That was question one.

And I'll ask Fiona to respond to your second question about forms. I will say that I find that our system is quite a bit different from other systems. With most of the systems I've seen, whether it be in veterans affairs or social welfare, there is a very high level of audit and paper trail required by the bureaucrats. The central agency wants to know how much money is spent on everything and to put ticks on every decision.

In New Zealand, we tend to delegate responsibility on a much broader base and to base it on trust. The agreement for the case managers is more general than you would find elsewhere. They have more delegated powers to make more decisions and therefore less paperwork.

I'll come back to Fiona, who can answer on the forms, and I'll leave Fiona to talk about cemeteries as well.

[Fiona Macrae]

On collection of information, as they align most of the defence force, that will give us better access to defence records. We're looking to digitalize information so we have that information regularly available to a number of decision-makers. The other thing with the digitalization is that if we can move on the chipped card, we can put medical records on the chip, so we have a copy with the person throughout his life, and we can add to it, as well as having it centrally stored.

Information is a big concern to us, not in terms of the quality of the records, but because most of them are paper-based. We need to move to a more digital format for some of the older records, to make them more accessible.

On forms, we too struggle to make sure things are as simple as possible, so that we are not asking for too much information but that we get enough. We will be training the RSA welfare offices to assist people to fill in forms correctly. They are another source within the community to assist people and help them through that.

With respect to cemeteries, since the 1920s we've had an arrangement with local authorities where they set aside part of standard cemeteries for ex-service personnel who have served in a war in emergency. That's not just for New Zealanders; that's for any of our allies. They can be buried there at either no cost or a reduced cost. We provide subsidized memorials for them. They don't have to be war dead; they could just have served. We maintain those cemeteries for war graves through the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. That's dealt with by our Ministry for Culture and Heritage, as a heritage issue. So we have two types of systems.

If you're a Canadian, a World War II veteran living in New Zealand, you could be buried in one of those services areas in a cemetery. Those cemeteries have flagpoles. On ANZAC Day they're used as places for the community to go to remember the service of the people who served, not only our country, but our allies. Schools often go there for history reasons, to identify different service. That's a community resource that we put quite a bit of time into as well.

[Bev Shipley, Conservative, Lambton—Kent—Middlesex, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

Now back to the Liberal Party of Canada and Mr. Valley, for five minutes.

[Roger Valley, Liberal, Kenora, ON]

Thank you.

Minister, I'm going to go back to what we had a chat about before. It probably wouldn't surprise you that we don't always agree with each other around this table, and I disagree with my colleague that we know where all our veterans are. Many of our veterans aren't even registered, and that's part of the problem.

[A witness]

Oh, oh!

[Roger Valley, Liberal, Kenora, ON]

I'm glad to see you have a sense of humour in the morning, because they're going to be after me after this.

Veterans move across the line, especially in our cities. There's no way for an individual MP to know exactly where they are. The addresses change. We can do a mailout to every household in our ridings and still miss veterans.

You talked about the idea of a card. That's something we need to follow closely, to make sure we know where our veterans are as much as we can. The problem is not the veteran who wants you to know where he is; it's the veteran who doesn't want you to know where he is. He's the one we can't find. He's the one, as you mentioned earlier, whose family recognizes this problem, but they can't get help. We need to have some way to contact them ahead of time and let them know we're a contact point, that we're a service they can use.

Quite often, and all my colleagues can attest to this, many people don't realize they can go to their MPs for any problem, especially at the federal-provincial level. They just try to do it all themselves. They get themselves into a worse mess by not coming to our offices first. That's the message I want to deliver to the veterans in my riding.

I can go to the local watering hole, the Legion, and I can meet with them and talk to them. They talk to their buddies and say, “Well, get a hold of Valley's office and talk to him.” That's the only way we really have to contact them. There's no method other than that. Blank mailouts may not contact them.

We want to follow closely what you're doing, to see if there is a way we can reach out before there's a more serious problem.

[Rick Barker]

I agree with that. I'll just say on the information systems, which Fiona has alluded to, that they are all paper-based systems. There can be veterans walking down the street who walk into an office and say, “I'm a veteran”, and nobody in the office will have a list of them. You have to go back to Defence, and say, I have Rick Barker here, who claims he's a veteran. Is this true? That sends them off to scurry through the records, to wade through the papers and blow dust off them, and finally they get some dusty file and say, well, yes, he is because he did such-and-such; ah well, we'll then go and do other things for him.

Our systems have been very poor. What we're hoping to do is connect them up and have a complete list of them and know where our veterans are. Now, a veteran could have passed away and their funeral been treated as a civilian one, and we wouldn't know the veteran has gone because we're not connected to the information databases. We don't know. Someone could have gone overseas. We don't know that either. But what we're hoping to do is to get much better information.

One of the keys to this is the veterans card that we have produced now in New Zealand, a little card with a red poppy on it—it's unmistakeable. At the moment, it doesn't attract a lot of value in itself, but it eventually will. It's similar to a card we're giving to our superannuitants over the age of 65. Theirs has a lot on it. Anyway, it gives them access to some services. It will grow, because they have the superannuitants' card.

The veterans card is highly sought after, because there are some firms that will give discounts to superannuitants. People turn up with a veterans card, pull it out and ask, “Do you give discounts to veterans?” The person will see the poppy on it, and even though the firm probably doesn't give discounts, for a veteran, they'll say, “Okay, mate, we do.” So the veterans are finding these cards highly desirable, because even where there's no official discount rate, the firms are giving them one.

It reflects a change in values in New Zealand, where veterans are being accorded more respect today than they were 20 years ago—and I would say more respect in various sorts of ways, for a range of reasons.

One is that in New Zealand we were taught at school about the kings and queens of England. I never found any use for that piece of information in my life here, but anyway, I know a lot about it. But I was taught almost nothing about New Zealand history. What we're doing in schools now is we're teaching New Zealand children about New Zealand history—and of course you can't teach New Zealand history without talking about Gallipoli, about the Western Front, about World War II, about Korea and Vietnam, and so on, and who the veterans are. And schools are teaching people about ANZAC Day, which is our day of commemoration, and about what the poppy means. So the kids are seeing in their parents and their grandparents values they never saw before, and there's more respect. So there's a change in dynamic. There are other things, too, which I am sure you are well aware of.

So veterans in New Zealand are being accorded higher status and more respect and more regard. This is going to have a follow-on effect, in my view, for generations. I am sure the same is happening in Canada, as it is in other countries. I think this is all for the good. Instead of it being just something a person did—which is what the generation from World War II said, “Oh, I just did my job and that was the end of it, so don't give me anything else”—people are now saying, “No, you're a veteran; you are a special person.”

I think we're going to have changes as a consequence of that. I don't know where this is going to go, but it is going to go somewhere really good.

[Roger Valley, Liberal, Kenora, ON]

You've taught us something here today, so thanks for that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Anders]

I'd just like to add that I know the Prime Minister has made comments that he sees larger and larger people coming out for veterans day ceremonies across the country from year to year, so it's good to see.

Now over to the Conservative Party and Mr. Sweet for five minutes.

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

Our chairman meant larger numbers of people, not larger people, are coming out to the events.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

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

There might be a number of larger people in the larger numbers!

Thank you very much, Minister, for coming, and thank you for your good sense of humour.

I want to ask you, do you have troops on the ground right now in Afghanistan or Iraq?

[Rick Barker]

We have troops on the ground in Afghanistan. We don't have any in Iraq. We sent a group of engineers there for a period of time under a UN mandate. We have troops on active duty in East Timor. We have troops in the Solomon Islands. And I think there are about another ten or a dozen other places where we are, with UN-led operations.

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

My question then would be, would those in East Timor, the Solomon Islands, and Afghanistan be considered veterans after their service?

[Rick Barker]

Yes.

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

Good. I just wanted to clarify that I had the right definition.

Do you have a good working relationship with our Veterans Affairs? Has it been ongoing for some time now?

[Rick Barker]

Yes, we do. I am very gratified, having been to two ministerial summits, by how good they are. I have found them to be very worthwhile.

We turn up as a group to discuss issues that are tough to discuss with anybody else. I think Veterans' Affairs is quite a unique portfolio for a variety of reasons. I find it really refreshing to talk to my counterparts in other countries, because we face similar issues and there's a genuine desire to learn from each other and try to make improvements. I think they've been very constructive meetings.

The second thing is there's a huge amount of history here among the various groups. I find at the officials level and all the way down there is cooperation, support, and respect for each other of the highest level. I can't find any fault with it.

I think we can improve on it. Having been to the United States as part of the Ministry of Veterans' Affairs, we're inviting the next group to come to New Zealand, and I think we'll go around the various countries. In doing so we'll rebuild connections that haven't been there for a long time. It's been a long time, if ever, since a Minister of Veterans Affairs from Canada has been in New Zealand for ANZAC Day. The symbolism of that will be very powerful and will resonate throughout our community.

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

Very good. I'm certain that my colleague, who was concerned about lamb chops, will be happy to know that our minister will get some when he's there.

Finally, every commemoration or ceremony I've been to in Canada always ends with “at the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them”. I think that's really the heartfelt feeling of all veterans. They were all prepared to lay down their lives for their friends and for their countrymen and women. The only thing they want is to make sure they're remembered.

I want to ask if you could briefly go through some of the things you do. I'm certain you fund a number of things on ANZAC Day, but what do you do to commemorate and memorialize the service of your veterans?