I'd say they're quite a bit different. I'm actually just starting to move into the Veterans Affairs program, although I have utilized certain assets from Veterans Affairs.
One of the great difficulties I had with the military was that there was an atmosphere that was totally unprepared to deal with the catastrophically injured. When I first came home, I was not the first amputee from the war in Afghanistan and I constantly ran into hurdles that really affected my quality of life and my family's as well. Things like aids to daily living were almost impossible to obtain. Just to get my house accessible took over a year. That was a really long drawn-out nightmare. I'm not the only one who actually experienced that. There seemed to be kind of a battle with what was covered and what was not and who would cover what. That was quite a challenge, and it seems to me that there was a lot of overlap, but people weren't necessarily sure if Veterans Affairs or the military was going to cover it, and things like lead time, house modifications, and stuff like that were a real challenge for sure. I would say that probably the one common thing is housing, especially for the severely disabled.
The military originally took this on but there is a whole group of caveats that make it difficult for the delivery of this in a timely fashion. For example, some people find themselves severely disabled coming back to houses that they can't physically occupy just because their houses are not wheelchair friendly, wheelchair safe. They essentially require a whole new house to live in.
In my case the biggest problem was that the rules stipulate that you have to have three quotes to obtain an actual work order. The problem was, in Calgary, I could only obtain two quotes, so thus, the work order would never proceed. Luckily I had a switched-on troop warrant who was able to connect with my case manager and eventually got the ball rolling.
Again, there were other problems. For example, the contractor who bid the lowest was awarded the contract to do my house. However, I have a seven-year-old, and they were going to build me an elevator with no doors because that was the cheapest one, and that wasn't included in the quotes. Here I was; they were going to build me an elevator with no doors so I'd just have this gaping elevator shaft.
That's just my own personal story. I'm sure as other veterans come before you, they will all bring up that housing was a major issue for them, not just from the military side, because I know Veterans Affairs typically only covers aids to daily living once a member is out, but that might be something that should be looked at, that one or the other should cover it. Because Veterans Affairs is going to have the member for the rest of their life, it would probably be more beneficial for them to take care of that because they're going to have the member for a lot longer during that transition and that release period. With the military, it seemed like the job kept getting passed on and passed on, and guys were essentially treading water and not getting the items that they required.