The general direction is to make contact with the shelters and/or the individuals who are responsible for the shelters. The issue of homelessness is not an easy issue, and the way of dealing with it may not be the same in every particular city or every particular province. If you look at things such as shelters, soup kitchens, etc., many of them are organized differently. Some of them are run by umbrella organizations, some are independent.
I've been around the public service long enough to know that you can't sit in headquarters and say “Thou shall” and all of a sudden the issues are going to be resolved. You have to leave it, in my view, in a broad policy framework, and the goal is first of all to avoid people becoming homeless. But sad to say, some do, so the direction I've given to my staff is to work with the local veterans organizations, work with the shelters, work with agencies—whether it be the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, provincial social services—and create the connections. The connections have to be made on the ground so that when somebody identifies himself as a veteran....
We will get what I might call a tip or some information that we have a veteran in the shelter. You need to understand that just because someone is a veteran, and just because they're in the shelter, that may be their choice, and notwithstanding the intervention that we have, they may not be ready for our services and programs. Sometimes it takes a period of time to create a relationship, and that's where I'd like to make the connection with the OSISS peer support coordinators. Sometimes when someone is homeless, let's face it, they're down and out, they're probably angry at society, they're probably angry at the government. So sometimes it takes a connection by someone such as a peer who has had some of these very same difficulties and says, “You know, I used to be like that, but there is help, and these are some people....” You have to build the trust factor. So yes, getting information from police departments, getting information from social service agencies, those are all good things, but at the end of the day we have to build that trusting relationship.
I guess if I look at it, we have to also understand the diversity of the country. If we look at Parliament in itself, Parliament has representative members from every part of the country. Every part of the country has its own particular views, its own particular issues, and that's why we just don't have one parliamentarian but over 300 to reflect the views.
In that same thinking, we have to allow local managers to be innovative. There are some innovative projects that we're ready to launch in some of our big cities, but the reality is that they have to have some flexibility to be able to do that. We have a veterans helpline that's open 24 hours a day, staffed by counsellors. It's not an answering service; there's actually a counsellor who can help you. There's lots out there. The trick is to make the connection, and the trick is for the local managers, who know their environment--the people in social services, the people in the various agencies--to talk to them and say, “How can we make the connection?”
Last but not least, there are veterans who are homeless and who want to be homeless. I can tell you of a situation of a veteran I know of in a particular city who's homeless. He lives in his car, because that's his choice. He doesn't want to live at a fixed address for a number of reasons. But that's the reality. That doesn't mean the person isn't getting services from us. It doesn't mean he isn't getting help. But he's made a certain choice because of other factors in his life that he doesn't want to live at a fixed address.