In 1971 they had a plan called “Restore”. That was when we massively cut, hugely cut, the forces. We offered people a golden handshake, even people who had been Korean vets, and we let them go, like that.
Within three years, we were getting reports that a lot of them had died. It was not suicide; they had simply died of broken hearts, because they entered a world they didn't understand, and they were abandoned.
One of the areas looked at, and which we were seeing as a deficiency, was that being released from the forces and handing in your ID card and your uniform doesn't mean that the forces are out of you. When you instill loyalty, it stays ad vitam aeternam. What you need is a bridge to the next entity, in a sort of paternalistic way, to continue that loyalty you've committed to, particularly if you are a veteran, particularly if you've been in combat, have actually been injured, and have seen people killed. And there was no bridge. They were dropped off the forces, and they had to climb their way back into the veterans system, and then the veterans system took them as they could within the old system.
That process of rehabilitation and reintegration was introduced with the new Veterans Charter, but not many have taken them up on it. One of the interesting reasons is that not many of them have actually been released yet. A lot of them, particularly those from the Afghan war, are still in the forces. When they start to be released after their accommodation period of three years or sometimes four years, we're going to see whether that rehabilitation and reintegration program Veterans Affairs has built to pick them up before they leave--in fact, they're looking at six months beforehand--and help them through that transition to civilian life is going to work.
It's interesting; there was an article today about an interview I did yesterday. With the universality of service, the forces can't keep them, because there are too few to do the job to start with. But you might want to create a sort of subservice, where people who are injured can remain in uniform, maybe under different conditions. They can continue to serve in different jobs, because they have skills and experience, and not necessarily be released out. In so doing, you'd minimize, in fact, that trauma of moving to civilian life. Some don't want to see a uniform anymore and are happy to get out, but others simply want to stay on.
The forces would have to get an extra sort of manpower level, or person-power level, to absorb them, because what will the number be? Post-Afghanistan, there may be 1,500 to 2,000 who are significantly injured, not including all the post-traumatic stress. And we must remember that from 1991, with the Gulf War vets, whom we have treated rottenly, right through to 2006, when we started to bring in the new Veterans Charter, we have taken a lot of casualties. More than 10 were killed and more than 100 were significantly injured, and a couple of thousand were psychologically injured, everywhere from Somalia to Rwanda to Bosnia, and so on. That gang is sort of feeling a bit left out. Yet only with the changes we've seen today, with this coming legislation, are they going to start to be able to benefit from the new Veterans Charter, if that rehabilitation and reintegration starts.
Yes, Veterans Affairs Canada has a program. It's yet to be tested to know if it really works. But maybe DND should be given the option of trying to keep them.
I end that with the following. In 1998, when I was the ADM, I was brought on the carpet, for the forces, in front of our Human Rights Commission. The fourth pillar of it--that is to say, the hiring of disabled people--we were not meeting. The civilian side of DND was doing not too badly, but on the military side, no, because they all had to be universally deployable.
We could actually answer more appropriately the Human Rights Commission the right of employing injured veterans...but within the context that it does not affect the operational effectiveness of the forces--that is to say, those who are committed to deployment.