Thank you very much, Mr. Oliphant.
Yes, in terms of the report and my ideas not being mine alone, I wouldn't claim to own those ideas. In fact, more than 90% of Canadian Forces veterans do not belong to an organization. We're talking about more than 400,000 veterans who have no affiliation whatsoever. Who represents them? Who reaches out to them? That's what my job is, I think, as an advocate: to try to do the work that's not being done, which is to communicate with them and represent their views.
As far as the new Veterans Charter is concerned, there are many really good words: rehabilitation, re-establishment, opportunity with security. These are not new words. These are words that came from and were plagiarized from the World War II programs. The way they were defined after World War II was noble—extensive programs that addressed all aspects of one's life—and they dealt, as you said, with both the re-establishment or rehabilitation of someone leaving the military and entering civilian life and the catastrophic injuries. They had a comprehensive program that basically set the stage for the rest of the world to learn from Canada about what rehabilitation really meant.
The problem with using those words and associating them with the new Veterans Charter is, as we've already discussed, that the charter did not create any new programs per se; it merely duplicated or re-packaged them.
There really has to be a sit-down discussion of what it means to rehabilitate someone. I think we have to then decide, when rehabilitation is not extensive, that then all we have to do is give someone assistance with job placements, a bit of job hunting, and let him transition out of the military with a bit of cultural understanding. The new Veterans Charter does okay with that. That may be a person with a twisted ankle or Plantar fasciitis or some mild medical condition like that.
But for anyone who's seriously injured—and it doesn't have to be catastrophic, but for anyone with a psychological injury, for anyone who's dealing with a severe physical impairment or loss of a limb—the programs of the charter, although they may be present to assist these people, are virtually inaccessible to them for two reasons: first, that the bureaucratic processes, as all of you have noticed, are ridiculously overwhelming and far too discriminatory; second, that the Veterans Affairs employees have neither the skill nor the time to administer their programs. I'm sorry, I'll add a third one, which is the cultural barriers to assisting these veterans to access these programs.
All three of those areas are not being addressed by the Veterans Charter.
Creating all these new repackaged programs and throwing them on case managers who already have 900 to 1,500 clients each and not hiring any new case managers means basically, as the expression goes with justice—that “justice delayed is justice denied”—that benefits delayed are benefits denied.