Veterans Affairs Committee on March 15th, 2012

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much.

We're going to one question from the Conservatives and that will wrap it up.

[Brian Storseth, Conservative, Westlock—St. Paul, AB]

Thank you very much.

Actually, I just wanted to ask Mr. Blackwolf a question, but first of all, thank you for the brief history you gave us. Thomas George Prince was indeed one of the original members of the Devil's Brigade. One of the other prairie boys—being a prairie boy myself, I heard about him growing up—was David Greyeyes, who, as you are aware, received not only the Greek Military Cross, but eventually the Order of Canada as well. So we do have a proud tradition, not only across Canada with first nations, but particularly in the Prairies. That's something we should all be very proud of and make sure that we talk about.

I wanted to give you the opportunity to present the recommendations that you came here to present to the committee, and talk a bit about them.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

If I could, Mr. Blackwolf, we are geared by the clock, so at 5:30 the committee does shut down. I'd appreciate it....

[Richard Blackwolf]

As stated before, we provided some recommendations.

One was the one I've mentioned several times, getting away from for-profit insurance and replacing it with a military pension. If you're disabled, you receive an accelerated pension because of the shortening of your career. Your normal career would span 30 years. Everybody expects that, and nobody expects to be disabled.

If you become severely disabled, then extra costs are involved. So we're supporting an advancement of one rank and release at that point.

Also, the army culture is such that, as I say, there's nothing for these people to do. So accelerated release is important, and Mr. Zimmermann has a very good case here as to why things need to be speeded up for people who have disabilities.

I realize that people with disabilities go to the front of the line for federal employment, but the problem is they still have to go through the resumé items and all that. When you went into the military as a career, you were working in areas that probably had no relevance to civilian life, so as a Cold War veteran and also as a 39-year veteran of the Department of National Defence, I feel these people need to go past the resumés and go directly into an apprenticeship, some type of on-the-job training. They need to be given that opportunity so they can be employed immediately. They'll have their accelerated military pension. I hope the honourable members will see the value of that, moving away from for-profit insurance, because if they do get a job, they will lose that insurance. It will be clawed back. That's our suggestion.

Also, the military could form what's known as a Canada command, people who may have disabilities but can still do services in the military. We recommend that they form a cyber command, because there are some very skilled people who could learn programming and the next wars are going to be fought as cyber wars. China has a huge force of 20,000 young people that they employ as hackers. They have hacked in and stolen all the diagrams for the F-35 and everything else. So we could have a Canada command of people who aren't going to be deployed overseas.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much for that.

I want to thank all of you for coming here today. Your information and your input is very helpful to our study. We realize there are challenges; I think that has been pointed out. We think progress is being made and a lot more has to be made, and getting direct advice and comments from you is extremely valuable.

We're at the end of our time. On behalf of the committee, I want to thank you very much for being with us today.

The meeting is adjourned.