I always had really great support from my chain of command and from my unit in general.
One of the problems I had, for example, was with care delivery. I was originally sent to the Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Alberta. There was a real challenge with care delivery and quality of care, so I was actually pulled out of there relatively quickly.
The military did a fantastic job making sure I was getting proper care and looked after in a timely fashion, and getting what they thought I deserved. They would have sent me anywhere in the country if I thought I could have received better care. That was really outstanding. That really made a difference for my family.
One of the things I had was....There were a lot of teething issues again because I kept getting told, “This is new to us. This is new to us. This is new to us”, and there was a lot of difficulty in getting things like aids for daily living, and stuff like that.
Then one of the things that happened was I essentially became a photo-op for every local politician who came to see me and said, “Hey, I support the troops. I support the troops”. I've got a stack of business cards that is quite excessive. All these people said, “Hey, anything you need? Let us know if there are problems”. I found out as soon as I started bringing up problems that they would stop listening, and then the photo-op was over, so I found that really difficult.
Again, with the new Veterans Charter, here we are six years later and there have been numerous studies, numerous reports written. The ombudsman recently released one. The Equitas Society has another major one. I just feel like we have to explain it over and over again. It seems like we're just talking to a wall and there's been no progress made. It's getting really frustrating.
I don't necessarily have a problem with what happened to me. Getting killed, wounded, injured, maimed, that's what happens to soldiers, and that's the career I chose.
The main problem I have is all these promises were made to me that I would be taken care of, my family would be looked after. There is nothing in the new Veterans Charter for my family. There's nothing to support them. There's nothing to support my son or my wife, or anything like that. Whereas under the old system, there were survivor benefits, there was a different stipend depending on how many children you had, whether you were married. There's nothing like that in the new Veterans Charter.
These promises that were made to me, “Hey, this thing is evolving. It's going to move”, well, in six years I really haven't seen a whole lot of change. To me, it just seems like a whole group of empty promises.