Veterans Affairs Committee on May 27th, 2009

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Colonel Stogran, for coming here.

First, I want to commend you for your courage and forthrightness in making public the concerns you have about veterans. We hear a lot about supporting our troops, but supporting our veterans, in my books...as my colleague Peter Stoffer keeps saying, supporting our troops when they come home, when they're veterans, is as important as supporting troops in the field. So thank you for your forthrightness about this.

In looking at the mandate that was given to you, it seems to be adequate, and maybe you can comment: to review and address complaints by clients, to identify and review emerging systems, to facilitate access by clients to programs. The role has been called an ombudsman or an ombudsperson, which is a recognized international office that democracies are engaged in. But it seems you're being treated like an employee of the deputy minister. Is that your conclusion?

[Col Pat Stogran]

I would have to say that there's a lot of reading between the lines in my mandate. For example, I draw reference to my meeting with Machinery of Government in the Privy Council Office, and the message was quite clear that I was accountable to the deputy minister. This was always intended, despite the fact that in my mandate, in the order in council, it is clearly specified that I am accountable to the minister, to whom I'm supposed to report.

So I have a workable mandate. But at present there is latitude for individual interpretations. For example, I have no authority to resolve the difference of opinion that our office has with the department regarding the definition of “to review”. We need a definition we can enforce. It's not effective to have someone suggest to me one on one, behind closed doors, that the intent of the government was actually to withhold certain information from me so as not to constrain my ability to make public announcements. To me, that's the department trying to control my messaging. Thank you very much, but I will take my message to the Canadian people and to the veterans I serve based on what I see on the ground and the evidence that backs that up.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

I understand from what you said, and from your recent appearance at the Senate committee, that you now have legal counsel, so you can deal with the whole question of the nature of your office in a more formal way. I also understand that you have both internal legal counsel from the Department of Justice, or formerly from the Department of Justice, and outside counsel.

By the way, as I see your mandate, it says “review and address”. I don't know how you can address something if you don't know what it is you're addressing. So it seems to me that it is included in your mandate, but that's something for you to pursue.

Am I right in saying that the two problems you have identified are, first, that you need access to information about problems and issues, and, second, that you need recognition of your independence? Are those the two things? We're looking for ways to help you perform your role.

[Col Pat Stogran]

With respect to recognition of my independence, I view myself as being independent. I am functioning independently, regardless of what might be read between the lines.

With respect to support, the Office of the Veterans Ombudsman needs access to information so that we can make a balanced, unbiased assessment of the issues that we are confronted with from the veterans. We also need more personnel. There are 10 full-time equivalents in the department, misemployed right now, who were supposed to be working for the department and reporting to it, but are working on issues related to the veterans ombudsman.

In my last 18 months as an ombudsman, I have learned that we do not work through intermediaries. We need to have first-hand evidence—I will not comment on or use as evidence in my public commentary information that has passed through third parties. Our evidence needs to be as sound as the evidence that's used in our courts.

The third thing I'd throw out is the rank and stature afforded to the position in the GIC appointment. This reinforces my suspicion that the so-called ombudsman is more of an internal complaints department. The position is roughly equivalent to a public servant of the EX-2 level, a director or director general. This person, however, is charged with overseeing a department overseen by a deputy minister with a complete cadre of ADMs at the EX-4 level. The stature of the office is significantly lower than that of the organization it's charged with overseeing. How does a person of EX-2 rank have any credibility in sitting down with the DM and his ADMs to resolve issues before they go to the minister? Conceivably, that person may not have the necessary experience at that rank level.

So there are things that are working against the office. Those are the three, I think, that should be addressed.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

I'm sorry, Mr. Harris. You're substantially over your time.

Thank you, Mr. Stogran.

Now we move to Madam O'Neill-Gordon for seven minutes.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and a warm welcome to you, Mr. Stogran, for being with us this afternoon.

I listened with great concern today as we spoke about our veterans. I know that all of us in this room have a great love and admiration for our veterans, and we realize what they have done for us. None of us here would want to think that there is any veteran out there who is homeless. I know as well that we have a great passion to help these veterans, and I appreciate your passion for all of this.

When we visited the Daniel J. MacDonald Building on Monday, we felt, when we left, how strong and hard these people work. They leave no stone unturned to provide the very best possible accommodation and help that is available for veterans.

Do you consider that the privacy of the vet is the main reason we have homeless veterans out there? There are lots of programs there, and we have people dedicated to doing the best for the veterans. So why is there such a thing happening out there that we actually have veterans who are homeless?

[Col Pat Stogran]

Mr. Chair, I would like to offer, first of all, that I share the same opinion of the employees of Veterans Affairs Canada. I have spent a lot of time in the district offices, and the people I have met, without exception, are truly committed to looking after our veterans as much as the system will allow them to.

I also think that many of the employees of Veterans Affairs who make it to senior management positions in Charlottetown by staying there throughout their entire careers are truly dedicated to that one department. They are servants of the veterans before they are public servants, and I applaud them. But they can only do the job as much as the system will allow. And therein lies the problem, I think, of homelessness.

I would not want to get into the reasons people become homeless. It's a huge study, and it's a study that, really, Veterans Affairs should have embarked upon by now. Certainly our allies have.

What I would say is that the system lets down our veterans, not only our homeless veterans but the veterans who are not in that kind of predicament, because the system requires that they self-identify. The system is not proactive. Once a service person in the RCMP or the Canadian Forces crosses that no man's land into Veterans Affairs, that person is on his or her own. And if people are having problems, they have to go to Veterans Affairs and address them. The administrative chain that has built up behind people, either in the force or in the Canadian Forces, is not linked to Veterans Affairs. So they get lost in that no man's land when transitioning to become civilians.

There are some young people who have served overseas in the Rwandas, Somalias, Cambodias, Bosnias, and Afghanistans of this world who have spent as much time in theatres as our Second World War and Korean veterans have. If you couple that with the psychological damage that may have been done and an addiction to drinking, drugs, or alcohol as they make it across there, and you ask that person to go looking for help--statistics show when a person is 10 days away from becoming homeless--then I dare say that we've lost another generation of veterans. They will be much like the 85-year-old World War II and Korean veterans I have met here in Ottawa, as well as in Toronto, who have lived their lives on the streets and have survived there.

The idea is that we have to put out a safety net. This is sealing the cracks. Major-General Grant testified, I believe, either before this committee or the Standing Committee on National Defence, that the Canadian Forces and Veterans Affairs Canada have made great strides in treating people suffering from operational stress injuries through OSISS, the operational stress injury social support system. We have made great strides. But he recognized that some still slip through the cracks. It's really incumbent upon Veterans Affairs to seal those cracks, to identify why people fall into homelessness, and to reach out. Don't have them come to the office and say, “Please help me,” because that's just not going to happen.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

Let's suppose the police give a report to you of a homeless veteran or you find out some other way. Can you walk us through what you immediately do once you find out that there is a homeless veteran somewhere?

[Col Pat Stogran]

Mr. Chair, I'll walk through the couple of situations where I've met up with them. Personally, this is my approach. I would not qualify myself as an expert on homelessness in any respect, but we're certainly proactive in trying to meet these people.

As soon as I've heard of a case--and we are only now building the capacity to actually have investigators--I've taken it upon myself to meet with these individuals. The first thing I do is talk to them. I mentioned the one story of the World War II veteran. Another World War II veteran I met was actually hostile towards me. Unlike the first person, who was worried that he would lose whatever Veterans Affairs was giving to him and wanted to remain private, this person was quite angry about Veterans Affairs and whatever transpired throughout his lifetime. I had to talk to him. It actually took about an hour in both cases, these individuals whom we met with. It takes about an hour to break down their paradigm and their defences regarding whom they are talking to. Perhaps I was in a better position than most because I had the military background and I could relate to them. But it takes time to speak their language and to meet with them.

My team and I are sensitive to the plight of our veterans, to a fault. We ask them if there's anything we can do. I seldom travel anywhere without somebody from my team who's an expert in all things Veterans Affairs so that this person can advise me if there's anything we can do for the individual. In the cases where somebody asks us for help, we are only too willing to oblige. We have done so on two occasions.

Recognize that this is an economy-of-effort initiative that I've been doing in my spare time. I don't have the resources to blanket the entire country to meet with these organizations, but I do.... Alleviating hardship is our first priority when somebody comes to us.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

I realize for sure that you don't have the time, but--

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Sorry, Madam O'Neill-Gordon, we're over now.

Thank you, Mr. Stogran.

Now we're back over to the Liberal Party and Mr. Andrews for five minutes.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Thank you so much for coming in today, sir.

I'd just like to get back to this issue of you getting access to information. I do believe when Mr. Harris questioned you, you talked about the deputy minister and that person's role in conversations with you about what you can and cannot have access to. Could you explain that, what exactly the deputy minister has said to you?

[Col Pat Stogran]

Mr. Chair, on May 1 of this year, after some toing and froing over, I would say, the past eight months--which included getting legal advice from outside the government as well as from my current legal advisor, who's on my staff--the department came back and actually published the policy. It was a letter signed off by Madame Tining on May 1 that describes what the policy is. In essence they will restrict. They believe that the order in council, as they interpret it, prohibits us from having access to their legal advice, solicitor-client privilege between the department and their Department of Justice advisors, as well as confidences of the Privy Council.

Having said that, we had it on good authority that there was a strategic study conducted on the homelessness situation. In fact we contributed to a study, but the study never ended up in our office. This information was withheld from us and was actually classified as secret. From the advice of my legal advisor, it was very much overclassified based on the information that was contained in that study. When my lawyer inquired about it, we were told that there was information in there that could ultimately become confidences of Privy Council. It may seem trivial that the department has said that they will restrict us from legal advice, as well as confidences of the Privy Council, but what it does is it can bleed out into many other types of information.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

How many more types? How many more examples like that could you cite of where you've not gotten the information you've wanted?

[Col Pat Stogran]

At this moment in time, I can only think of two instances of where we were specifically denied certain documents.

It started when we were seeking the legal opinion that was being used in a manner...and this was about eight months ago. This was during the toing and froing on the definition of “to review”, as it's presented in the order in council laws.

So there was that legal opinion, and then there was the recent one to do with homelessness.

Really, at this point in time, I could do a bit of an internal review and come back to the committee with more instances of it.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

I would appreciate that.

Do you submit a written report to the deputy minister or the minister on the cases that you have looked into? And how much of what you've written to the minister or the deputy minister could be revealed to the public?

[Col Pat Stogran]

Mr. Chair, that's one of the things that has been problematic over the last year and a half--namely, identifying exactly what types of information the minister's office is in need of. We are bound by the order in council to provide an annual report, which we did last December. When I met with the minister's office, it was decided that what I had produced--as I wrote this, the audience I had in mind was the veterans I serve--was perhaps inappropriate for the parliamentary audience.

So we agreed that we would--

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Hold on. The report you wrote was submitted to the minister, and they told you they wouldn't release it?

[Col Pat Stogran]

No, Mr. Chair, perhaps I can clarify.

With regard to the information contained in it, other information was more appropriate for the annual report in terms of our office accountability. So it was agreed that....

The difficulty we encountered was that in producing our annual report by December, we were out of sync with the fiscal year. We couldn't really close off the books for accountability. So we are now writing an annual report up to March 31.

Having said that, the report that we produced, that I wrote with the audience of my veterans in mind, is being released to the veteran community, to the public at large, 60 days after it was submitted to the minister.

From my perspective, the information is still making it out to the public. It's just--

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

So the report we get will be as is, as you wrote it.

[Col Pat Stogran]

Mr. Chair, I write what I write; it was just whether or not you would call it an annual report.

We're now actually calling it “A Year in Review: An Introduction to the Veterans to the Office of the Veterans Ombudsman”. The information is intact.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you, Mr. Andrews. I actually allowed you to get that confirmation after your time was up too.

As well, Mr. Andrews, you were offered an undertaking errand for a report. Did you want the colonel to follow through on that?

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

Yes, please, if he wouldn't mind.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

We'll await those documents from your office, Mr. Stogran.

I'll go to Mr. Lobb of the Conservative Party for five minutes.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Thank you very much, Colonel, for accepting our invitation to the committee today. It's very gracious of you.

I was reading your biography before we came in here today. You definitely have a distinguished background, a distinguished career with the military. Your service in Bosnia and Afghanistan is duly noted, as is your degree from the Royal Military College, I believe in electrical engineering. I will commend you on an excellent career to Canada. It's definitely noted.

Like you, my grandfather was a multi-year veteran. He was definitely proud of his service and of his fellow veterans.

As well, as an ombudsman, with a second-degree black belt, you're definitely a force to be reckoned with. We should note that as well.

I'm on the human resources committee, and our committee is currently studying poverty in Canada. I was very impressed, during our visit to Charlottetown, by the complete strategy that Veterans Affairs has embarked on in terms of the overall product they offer to veterans on mental health, addiction, rehabilitation, and everything like this.

One point I want to make to you is that in the last six to eight months, the department has visited over 75 agencies. They have a number of lists. They work continuously to communicate with groups, to communicate with the grassroots, just so that the very mandate you have, that no one is left behind, is best addressed.

Do you have any thoughts on the department's efforts to track down those who may be, as you mentioned, falling through the cracks?