Thank you, everyone, for having me here.
I appreciate that the government is taking the time to review the new Veterans Charter. In my position as the executive director of the Veterans Transition Network, as a veteran myself who served in Afghanistan, and somebody who's gone through some of the operational stress injuries and come out the other side of the system, there are definitely some improvements that could be made along the way.
That being said, I also want to highlight some of the success stories and encourage some of the good parts of the new Veterans Charter that should be maintained. I hope the entire legislation is not completely thrown out, because our program did start in 1997 and as our clinicians can attest, and they've asked me to mention here today, there were a lot of complaints about the Pension Act as well. I just want to make that clear from the outset.
To best inform the committee, I want to talk a little bit about myself and where I'm coming from, and my experiences and the veterans whom I do speak on behalf of, who've been through my program.
I deployed to Afghanistan in 2008. I was 22 years old and my job was to guard supply convoys through Kandahar City to the forward operating bases in the region. It was one of the more stressful and dangerous jobs, obviously.
However, I can say without a doubt that when I was in Afghanistan, there were no feelings of fear or trepidation about taking on these missions. There was no requirement for an officer to order me or my colleagues to do this mission. We were young and gung-ho, and we wanted to go and take that risk. That's what we had trained for; that's why we joined the Canadian Forces. This was an asset to us and I think it's what made us effective on the battlefield, our willingness to take those risks, to engage the enemy.
The one story I reference for myself is a time we had to recover a crashed aerial vehicle that had gone down in the middle of nowhere and it required us to drive through a minefield. It was an old Russian minefield. There were numerous exploded Afghan vehicles all around this path through the minefield which they had pretty much created by guessing and testing. We were very well aware that anytime there was a big rainfall it would move the mines around. I was in the lead vehicle and there was a really good chance we were going to hit a mine on that mission, but not once did I stop to think that I could possibly die.
I bring this up just to highlight the level of emotional suppression that's required to be effective in the military. This is something that is also common in other trades and populations in Canada. If you think of police forces or high finance, some of these super stressful situations require people to change the way their body has evolved to react emotionally.
Now when we bring somebody who's gone through that experience back here to Canada, putting a label of post-traumatic stress disorder onto that person is not sufficient. It doesn't nearly capture the complexity of the issue the person's going through. The majority of the veterans—we've now had over 400 come through our program—are in this category of dealing with this sort of new way of dealing with emotional expression, changing from the way they were successful in places like Afghanistan, and how they're going to now be successful here in Canada.
The way this relates to the new Veterans Charter is that one of the requirements coming into a lot of the benefits is that somebody obtained a PTSD diagnosis or they have a medical release from the military. One of the recommendations I'll make at the end has to do with addressing this issue, because it's real when we look at the statistics that currently only 14% of veterans, of those who actually served in the forces, come to Veterans Affairs for services. The majority of people coming through our program have never gone to the government for services. We've all heard a lot about the stigma issues, especially with mental health, as being one of the contributing factors. There's also the issue that it's bureaucratically difficult to get your claims processed.
Again, I think there are some very positive strong points, like the earnings loss benefit that does allow people to get funded to go back to school, and the up to $75,000 they can get for that retraining. That's an amazing program. It's just difficult to access for somebody who's trepidatious about coming forward for help, aware there is a lot of anger in the community, and that there are never enough services for them. That also causes a barrier that there is this image that the government is not doing enough.
To take a step back into the Veterans Transition Network, the organization that I run, we deliver a 10-day program that helps these men and women who are in that in-between place. They haven't got the full diagnosis for post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, or one of the other mental health issues, and therefore, they do not often qualify for counselling or the other programs. They will come to our program first and they will get a chance to check in with themselves.
It's group-based, peer to peer. They'll get a sense of where they are, and to see how their peers are doing with it. Many of them do go on to access other services. The peer reviewed research we present every year at CIMVHR shows that our program does have a positive impact on their PTSD and depression scores. We are now evaluating quality of life as well.
Just as I talk about it, I want to take a moment to thank this committee, because it was this committee that helped us get federal funding in 2012. I had the privilege of presenting here in December 2011, and 11 months later we were a federally funded national organization. This committee should take credit for that, and it shows that working within the system does produce results.
This is where I come to my final points on the recommendations.
The one I've alluded to is to find some way to overcome the requirement for veterans to have a mental health or physical disorder in order to access benefits. The one area I've heard much talk about among our community is a Canadian GI bill, something that would target those veterans who are most vulnerable to issues like post-traumatic stress or other mental health issues, those who served in combat in places like Afghanistan or Bosnia when it was really difficult. We know statistically that they are predisposed to have issues around mental health and to have social issues about getting back into the workforce.
If we could get some sort of GI bill like the Americans have that qualify those people for schooling and re-education, regardless of whether they have an injury or not, that would go a long way to reintegrating our population of veterans, catching them early on before they are five, six, or ten years out and have been dealing with problems and they're finally at a point where it's a crisis and they need an intervention from the medical community.
The last point I'll make is around the issues with the Veterans Review and Appeal Board. This is a very psychologically distressing experience for many veterans, and often when they come into our program we have to spend time processing some of their feelings around it. It often isn't the content; it's just the way they're handled. They feel like they're asking for a handout, like they're actually fighting and sort of begging for their rights. This runs counter to the military ethos of self-sufficiency and competency. If something could be done to address that issue, I think it would be a huge help. I would suggest removing that from the system altogether and allowing the veterans to go to the court to resolve their disputes that way.
That's my presentation. Thank you very much.