Thank you very much for inviting my husband once again as a witness to testify on the new Veterans Charter.
I have been with Sean through his more than 10 years of advocacy work for disabled veterans and their families, and I believe the word “witness” clearly describes my perspective on the events that led to the creation, passing, and implementation of the new Veterans Charter. From my perspective as a wife, an immigrant to Canada, and in my experience as an accountant in two countries, I would like to make a few observations.
First, as a family member of a prominent veteran's advocate in Canada who is assisting disabled veterans and their families, neither I nor the other family members of disabled veterans whom I know have ever been consulted by Veterans Affairs. Neither have we been educated or provided with any educational material as to what specific programs Veterans Affairs or the new Veterans Charter provides.
Second, some people have said that we have to remove the emotion from the debate on what benefits and programs Veterans Affairs provides to veterans and instead look at it as a business model. As an experiment, let us just follow this reasoning.
Parliament is the factory that produces a product for sale. VAC is a corporation that administers the distribution of the product, and in this case, the new Veterans Charter is that product. The people of Canada are the shareholders of the corporation. You are the board of directors representing the shareholders. Veterans and their families are the customers.
In a business model, when a customer tells the corporation that the product does not fulfill their needs or is defective, the corporation cannot dismiss the concerns of the customer or tell the customer he's wrong and force him to accept the product. If the corporation does this, the customer would quickly abandon the corporation and buy another product from a different company. As customers flee the company that is making and selling this defective product, the stock price will fall and shareholders will become outraged and demand that the board of directors order the company and its employees to change the product so that the clients keep buying it.
The sad truth is that disabled veterans do not have the option of turning somewhere else when VAC does not provide a service or a product that answers their needs. Veterans depend solely on you, as representatives of the Canadian people, to tell Veterans Affairs to change their product.
Third, the selling of the new Veterans Charter product seems more characteristic of the hype associated with an intensive marketing campaign like those I have only seen in the business world, unlike the noble and sacred process of open debate and inclusive discussions necessary to create any law, especially one so important to so many who have given up so much for Canada. These are the democratic principles that inspire me, and I imagine all Canadians need to know that our disabled veterans and their families are granted the fullest generosity of the very democratic principles for which they fought and lost so much.
Sadly, as the public campaign to sell the new Veterans Charter continued, I witnessed the damaging effects of another campaign that took place behind closed doors to silence and discredit a disabled veteran who merely wished that the new Veterans Charter be studied better before it was approved. I am, of course, speaking about my husband.
The new Veterans Charter programs do not apply to Sean. He was only standing up for those disabled veterans and family members who could not speak for themselves. Instead of listening to him, certain Veterans Affairs officials viewed him not as someone trying to improve the product, if you allow me to come back to our business model, but as a competitor who had to be crushed at all costs.
After going through many of the 13,000 pages that VAC holds on Sean, I am still unable to find a reasonable answer to the following questions: Why did more than 400 people within VAC, including the media relations director, need to know details about my husband's medical conditions or financial benefits? While the director of public consultations on the new Veterans Charter was opposing my husband's view on it, why did he need to know that my husband suffers from fibromyalgia, has PTSD or a prostate illness, and how are these medical conditions relevant to my husband's opinions on the new Veterans Charter? Why did VAC bureaucrats, such as the director of treatment and her assistant, who were in charge of treatment approval, sarcastically refer to him as “our favourite client”? Why did this same director mislead the VAC finance section into supplying her with the details of his financial benefits, only to place them in a briefing note to the VAC minister the next day? Are VAC employees, such as the director of the task force that designed the new Veterans Charter, so afraid of open debate that they have VAC take the gloves off to deal with my husband? Why did bureaucrats call my husband twice in one week to say that they knew he had been trying to exercise his democratic right to speak to a minister and that he should not try to speak to former Minister Thompson? Since when does disagreeing with VAC and trying to help others without any self-interest become such a revolutionary idea to our government that we allow disabled soldiers to be persecuted and punished by any means necessary? Even in the business world, such behaviour is not acceptable and is even illegal.
Thankfully, veterans' benefits and freedom of expression are not controlled by the business world. They are matters of the heart and at the foundation of this country, a country so impressive in principle that I and so many others have left our homes to become Canadian.
After five years of witnessing such an un-Canadian reprisal by public servants, I urge you to stop this from ever happening to anyone else. I plead with you to create a mechanism that allows veterans to voice their concerns without fear of reprisals from the people who have a fiduciary duty to care for them. I urge you to write a law that prohibits the sharing of personal information of any veteran or their family member to anyone in the department, especially to senior managers and ministers, just because the department has possession of it.
I have watched firsthand the devastation of my husband as he witnessed the most sacred and personal facts of his life—his inner thoughts—being shared without regard for his dignity. I ask you please not to let these actions go unaddressed. We have both lost much because of what Veterans Affairs has done, just because Sean was trying to help other disabled soldiers.
Thank you.