Veterans Affairs Committee on Oct. 8th, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you.

There are two minutes left, Mr. Murphy or Mr. Andrews.

[Scott Andrews, Liberal, Avalon, NL]

No, we're fine.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Now we'll go to the Conservative Party and Mr. McColeman, for four minutes.

[Phil McColeman, Conservative, Brant, ON]

I have a couple of questions.

You mentioned earlier the DVD of the vignette that's available. How do we get that, Mr. Sullivan? Can we get copies of it?

[Derek Sullivan]

I think requests from parliamentarians normally go through our minister's office. We can get them to you that way. For the DVD, that's probably the most effective way.

In the sampler packs of the learning materials and all the other things we have available that are sent to your offices, there is information on ordering those in volume. We have a 1-800 line, and we have an online ordering system.

The DVD with the vignettes is a little different, because it's not generally available in volume to the general public. It's on our website. It will be on television. It will be appearing in many locations. It will be at NHL hockey games on November 10. For the DVD, the best route is probably through the minister's office.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you, Mr. McColeman.

There are three minutes left for the Conservative side. Does anybody have any other questions?

Go ahead, Mr. Lobb.

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

My question is on the long-term care facilities for our seniors. Are there any efforts or projects being put forward to the nursing homes or long-term care facilities?

[Derek Sullivan]

Our district offices are quite active in organizing events and bringing events into the nursing homes and long-term care facilities where there are veterans. Most long-term care facilities across the country organize activities, and many of them receive support or materials from Veterans Affairs. Many of these facilities receive support for the long-term care of the veterans in those facilities from the department. They have regular contact with departmental staff who are in the facilities to maintain contact with veterans and to make sure their needs are met. Through that regular contact, they are aware of what is available from Veterans Affairs. In many cases, our staff assist them with their activities. Certainly at Ste. Anne's Hospital in Montreal, there are significant remembrance activities in that facility.

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

The mandate for Veterans' Week is for students and educators. Obviously, every year you want to know if it was effective. How well is the message getting into the schools? It's obviously provincial territory as far as education goes. Is there a way for you to measure how effective the program is? Is there a way for the ministries of education in the provinces to show whether they support this or not, and why? Are there any indications?

[Derek Sullivan]

Quite a number.

As you know, we provide learning materials to schools. First of all, at the most basic level, we track the orders placed by teachers, and that's a good indication of what they think of the materials, because we don't provide them in bulk without request. They have to order the material. Then within each of the packages we send to teachers we include an evaluation form. We receive a surprising number of those evaluation forms back, because some people of course don't have the time or don't take the time to fill those out and provide us feedback, but many do. The feedback we've been receiving is that the materials are a tremendous improvement over what had been provided some years ago, very positive feedback on what teachers consider to be the effectiveness of the materials themselves.

We also work with the provincial ministries of education, who of course set the curricula for the school systems across the country, and as we are developing the materials we provide the schools, we ensure that they meet the keys for the provincial curricula across the country. We apply for certification of our learning materials as either core curricular materials--that's our dream--or official curriculum support materials in the provincial ministries of education. Our success in many cases was having them officially recognized or even required by the provincial ministries of education for use in schools.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you, Mr. Lobb and Mr. Sullivan.

Mr. André, would you like to ask a question? We have a couple more minutes left.

[Guy André, Bloc, Berthier—Maskinongé, QC]

Your programming is very interesting.

My question is along the same lines as that asked by my colleague, Mr. Gaudet. To reach more veterans, as other members have pointed out, would it be possible to further decentralize a chunk of the budgets and activities so that communities with veterans, whether rural or urban, could take more responsibility for the Remembrance Day event?

For instance, I have been involved in a number of organizations, round tables and action groups over the years. And sometimes, in the health sector, we would put down $2,000 or $3,000 on a table, and people would join forces, get together and organize activities such as mental health awareness activities.

Do you know what I mean? Sometimes, giving local communities a small boost can cause people to take action, which can have a very positive ripple effect, in my opinion.

I would like to hear your thoughts on that.

[Derek Sullivan]

In fact, we have decentralized the spending on remembrance in quite a number of ways. First of all, we have Canada Remembers offices throughout in the country. In the province of Quebec, we have an office in Montreal that works with our district offices in Quebec City and elsewhere in the province for Veterans Affairs activities.

But to get directly to your point about the community groups, that is exactly what we have through the community engagement partnership fund. You're 100% on the mark that community groups can do a tremendous amount, often with a very modest amount of support from the government. The community engagement partnership fund supports small groups. Sometimes the requested contributions are $300 or $400, sometimes $2,000 or $4,000, for remembrance activities at the community level.

In addition, we have a sister program to that, the cenotaph and monument restoration program. As I mentioned, there are over 6,000 cenotaphs and monuments across the country. Sometimes all a community needs to bring one of these back to its former state and glory is some assistance. Sometimes the challenge just seems too great or daunting for a small community or small community group to take it on, and this program provides up to 50% of the cost of restoring a cenotaph or monument, up to a maximum of $25,000 in program contribution. Between these two programs, we have approximately $2.2 million available in funding. It's not available for the department to use for its own activities; it is exclusively for community groups and not-for-profit organizations across the country.

The response from communities has been tremendous, both for the cenotaph and remembrance initiatives in communities across the country. Both are extremely important parts of the program. The community engagement partnership fund has been around since 2001, and the cenotaph program was started in 2005.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you, Mr. Sullivan and Mr. André.

I made an agreement that at 10 minutes to the hour we'd make sure you could make your next meeting. I think I actually have two minutes of grace here for you, Mr. Sullivan. Thank you very much for coming to our committee again and reminding us what we can do. Obviously, just listening to Madam Sgro and the actions she's taken, your words have not gone unheeded. We appreciate the opportunity to be equipped with resources.

We'll let you go to your meeting now.

[Derek Sullivan]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

I'll be brief, colleagues.

After our constituency work week, we'll be coming back on Tuesday. We will have the departmental officials from Veterans Affairs Canada give us an update of where they believe they are at with the new veterans charter and their recommendations for going forward.

On Thursday, the witnesses we were supposed to have for the second hour today will be coming, the new combined Historica-Dominion Institute. Then, of course, I'll be relying on members of the committee for suggestions for witnesses going forward.

I am going to have our clerk distribute a report that we did in the 39th Parliament on post-traumatic stress disorder. Madam Sgro has distributed it to the committee before and has also sent me, as chair, a letter regarding some past Toronto Star articles and concerns raised by them, which Madam Sgro shares, about the treatment received by veterans returning from Afghanistan. So I want to distribute the PTSD study done in the previous Parliament. Of course, Monsieur Gaudet would be very familiar with that, as he was part of the committee at that time. With the report, you will have an idea of what's already on the record and then you can best select the kinds of witnesses you want and the path you want go on for investigation. That's all it's for; it's just a resource for you.

Madam Sgro.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Further to that, Mr. Chair, you also have a request from me and from the Widows on a Warpath group to do with Agent Orange. I know they've asked to come and speak to the committee.

There's a book by Chris Arsenault on the Agent Orange issue that you can get from the Library of Parliament. It's a small booklet; it's not a whole lot of reading. I say this in a totally non-partisan way. I've read that book and I've done some more research on it, and it's really quite appalling what happened there: the fact that many of our soldiers were used as guinea pigs to test out chemicals that were used in the Vietnam War. They couldn't test it on U.S. soldiers and they tested it on ours.

I'm raising the issue because I think we can't ignore that but should do whatever we can possibly do to raise that issue and talk more about it. We shouldn't be forgetting about the kinds of chemicals that were used then that we may be feeling the effects of today. Where it would go I'm not sure, but we're talking about veterans here, people who are suffering still today as a result of those chemicals. If you actually got the book from the Library of Parliament or purchased it, I think you would share my concerns. I think it's worthy of our spending some time on that.

I just put that out there. I know you have the request. But I think it's quite an appalling issue that happened in those days, and I think we need to have that awareness, as members of Parliament, on some of these things.

[The Chair, Conservative, David Sweet]

Thank you, Madam Sgro.

If there are no other comments, then this meeting is adjourned. We'll see you in one week.