Veterans Affairs Committee on April 3rd, 2014

[Senator Roméo Dallaire]

Yes.

I think the terminology could certainly be something, but I would strongly recommend that the nature of the beast and why it needs reform is you have to change its philosophical framework in not only the covenant, but get it out of being workmen's compensation and make it a Veterans Charter.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much, Mr. Hawn.

Now, Mr. Valeriote, please, for six minutes.

[Frank Valeriote, Liberal, Guelph, ON]

Thank you, Senator Dallaire, for your service to our country, not only in the forces, but as a senator and thank you for appearing before us today.

You have been quite candid with the country, really, in relation to your PTSD, your post-traumatic stress disorder. Many who have appeared before the committee and other veterans we've talked to are quite open about it, some are not open, some leave the forces unaware of the consequences of what they've seen and how they may suffer from it later.

Just this morning, I had the benefit of a briefing from the ministry and I asked them what goes on at the end of their term of duty with the force? Well, they have an exit review. I was trying to be probative. How probing are you of any evidence of PTSD? Well, they're not sure that they're that probing, frankly; ask a few questions and hope that a person is candid and honest with them. I recommended some things, a checklist, maybe even a written test of some sort. Are you having nightmares? Are you angry all the time? Or whatever the signs might be. Some blame the forces for not reaching out enough, some blame the veteran for not being aware.

How do you think Veterans Affairs should be dealing with the issue and should they deal with it before the person leaves and becomes a veteran or wait until something's happening?

[Senator Roméo Dallaire]

First of all, the injury happens when they're still serving. Once they're injured and are declared to be veterans because they've served at least one year, then they get a file from Veterans Affairs.

So coming back a bit for a second, the reason I talked about one ministry is that while a soldier is serving he also has a file at Veterans Affairs, which is providing resources there, and sometimes you have friction. You have two departments feeding the same problem, which is not necessarily coordinated.

The scale, because it's of great significance to your question.... The only country that reinforced me during the genocide was this country, with a couple of Hercs. Of the 11 officers who were with me in Rwanda, 7 out of the 12 of us have suffered significantly with PTSD. One committed suicide 15 years afterward, and he was under treatment. Families have busted up because of the pressures and the strains on family life from someone who is injured with this. The scale of the requirement is often underestimated, both by those who are injured and also by people around them.

Coming specifically to how we've been handling it, I think that pre-deployment awareness and training have achieved a very high level of capability. In-theatre requirements—although I was surprised the other day about not having services in French, though I'd be interested to know whether there are any psychiatrists who want to deploy in a war zone.... But putting that aside, contract it.

In the field we have found that the requirements—both the troops who are there and the way that amongst themselves they have been trained to take care of their own, plus the professional therapy there—have been quite effective. The transition back, with the four or five days in Cyprus or wherever to decompress, has been crucial. Even though it's a strain on the family, it's crucial.

You can't walk out of a firefight and within 24 hours walk the street downtown. We saw what happened with Vietnam. When I went to the Americans to get help in 1997 because we had no capability at all, they said they didn't want us to do what they had to live through. They said they had lost 58,000 or so, many identified on that monument in Washington, but by 1997, 22 years after the end of the Vietnam War, they had had more than 102,000 suicides directly related to Vietnam that they knew of.

So the follow-on is the crux. Is the follow-on as rigorous, as developed, as it should be? I mean not only for the regular force guys, whom you can take by the scruff to make sure they parade to get help—even though they're not volunteering, but are at least seeing a therapist who can do some assessment, hopefully—but also for the reservist who is in Matane, who has nothing around him, and a reserve unit that has no assets to help him, no special training days or money or capabilities locally to influence the situation.

I would argue that the follow-through is still weak, and the follow-through is very much dominated by the psychiatrist—which is no problem: they give you the pills. I take nine pills a day, and that keeps me sort of like this—reasonable. I need that.

But what I do need, however, is the psychologist who is making me live with this and is trying to bring me to a level at which I can be functional. I think this is the area in which the program is still very weak; it's why we still are seeing the casualty rates, not only in the military but in their families, continue to rise. The follow-through, the demand that they go through a rigorous review, every one of them.... They put them through a rigorous review to deploy them. So they come back, and all of a sudden we don't have to have that same rigour?

When I commanded my brigade, the dentist had more power than commanding officers, because he would come in and he'd have a list of those who were red-tagged. Anybody who was red-tagged—meaning that he was not deployable—we could put on charge for not having followed the rules by going to get good dental care. I don't see that for this injury. I would argue that maybe it has to go to that extent.

The therapists have told me, oh yes, but they have to volunteer to come in. Somebody even stupidly told me, oh yes, but they're stigmatizing themselves. I haven't heard bullshit like that in years. You don't self-stigmatize yourself; you're injured. That creates the isolation, and so it's a non-existent entity.

And the fact that the individual is not seeking help voluntarily is maybe due to the therapists' not being forthcoming enough. People don't like to go to a therapist. They're not all Woody Allen, who thought that having a psychiatrist or a psychologist was “in”. He thought that in his movies, although you don't want to imitate him in other stuff. The therapists have to sell their product and go much closer to the units and become more intimately engaged.

How do you hand all that over to Veterans Affairs? It just doesn't happen that often. You nearly have to start from scratch. I have had the same therapist for 13 years. If somebody walked in one day and told me I needed another therapist, we'd be in serious trouble.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much.

Now we'll go to Mr. Hayes, please, for six minutes.

[Bryan Hayes, Conservative, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

General, it was really nice chatting with you earlier, before the meeting. I expect strongly that your path and my Dad's have crossed somewhere along the way. I hope we have a chance to share that history a little bit more.

I want to bring one quote out of the subcommittee's report; it was good. It says, “Overall we found that...Veterans Affairs Canada and the...new Veterans Charter serve the majority of...Canadian Forces personnel and veterans well.” It is important that this not be lost as we undertake the study.

I want to pick up a little bit where Mr. Chicoine started, with reference to the absence of a clear, universally agreed social contract between the people of Canada represented by their government, obviously, on one hand, and Canadian Forces members and veterans on the other hand. I believe you mentioned, in terms of the process for such a social contract, that you thought it is something that should be perhaps negotiated, but ultimately should probably go through the House.

I want to get a sense of the process by which that would develop. Who would we include in that development? Maybe you can elaborate a bit.

Obviously, this wasn't included in the Veterans Charter in 2005, so I guess the question is why it wasn't included then. What role do you see this committee playing in the development of the new social contract? I think we're all committed to it.

Thank you, sir.

[Senator Roméo Dallaire]

Thank you very much.

In fact, in the Neary report we use the term “social covenant”, remembering that this was not just some sort of fly-by-night thing; that this was feeding continuously the DM and ADMs on the reforms that we thought were required. But much of it got overtaken by the bureaucratic analysis of the problem rather than the actual requirement.

Before I mention process, let me, if I may, go back to your point about the charter's meeting the majority of the requirement.

When I was assistant deputy minister of personnel at National Defence, we had 80,000 military, and I had 31,000 civilians also at the time. I would go to the Armed Forces Council on which the three-star generals sit to make all the decisions with the CDS, and at least 75% of all the agenda points were on personnel things: quality of life and God knows what—postings, promotions, and everything else.

I would watch how all these capital projects would go through—buying trucks, buying this, buying that—and how they were managed, and I was seeing that the personnel problem was being managed the same way, as if it were a project like a truck project. So you brought in a personnel solution, a policy, and they'd say, okay, we've resolved that. Then it was as if they were saying, don't come back with that for the next 20 years, because that's how long we get with our trucks, 20 years, so we don't want to hear of this problem again.

But then, when the people would defend their capital projects, something I was involved with for four years, if I got a truck that provided me 90% efficiency on the road, I was pretty happy with that. But when I went into the personnel world it became obvious that the only percentage I was allowed to go to or go below was 100%, because every one of the personnel counts.

If you have something working to 75% or 80%—VRAB is great at statistics, pull out whatever statistics you want—but you ain't hitting 100%, then you still have a flaw and a problem.

That's the aim of the exercise that I hope we're looking at, the margin that is there: they served, they're hurting, they have different problems, and it can be complex, and it can be.... God knows how they're fiddling, sometimes, or whatever, but they are also just as much a part of how to be handled as the vast majority.

The system must move to that level.

With regard to process for the covenant, I am most heartwarmed by the fact that you are querying me on that dimension.

We're seeing from one side people saying that we don't want a paternalistic system, we don't want people to be dependent, we want people to become normal civilians and do their thing and go back to civvy street.

That was fine after World War II, when people joined up for the war and after the war didn't want to make a career but wanted to go off and do whatever they were doing—go back to school and so on. But the people you're working with now are people who joined because they have an option and an interest maybe in making it a career. They're joining with that in mind, a commitment for the long term.

When your program doesn't reflect that you are recognizing that we wanted to keep them for 30 or 35 years but lost them because they are injured, then it's not because we're just Pontius Pilating ourselves away from them; it's that we're keeping that individual still focused on becoming a good citizen. But we haven't abandoned him. We haven't dropped them; we haven't dumped them out there; we are continuously following them. That paternalistic sense remains.

Going to that level with the covenant, as distinct from a social contract, is a philosophical framework that has to be articulated. It's not a capital program, it's not a budgetary program, it's not legislation that money can be put into, because you cannot determine that. We know what's going on right now with the lawsuit out of B.C., trying to look at numbers and so on. It has nothing to do with numbers; it is all to do with a philosophical framework for the way we see these people. We have committed them and now we have to bring them in.

I think that a framework of legislation that is a philosophy of.... We often hear about and use the term “our values”—“these are our values: we want to be ethical and transparent” and so on....

Well, this is values legislation, and I think you can pull something off like this, which then makes it so much easier for those who are given the mandate to implement it to at least sense that they're working within a ballpark that is responsible and are not always wondering whether we cut too much or didn't cut enough and so on. They'll sense that responsibility.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much for that.

We now go to Mr. Rafferty, please, for six minutes.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Could you tell me when we get to the last couple of minutes so that Ms. Mathyssen could ask a question?

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

You're going to do single questions, then.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Yes.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Unlike some others, we're going to do single questions. I wish more people would do that.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Well—single questions?—we shall see.

General Dallaire, thank you very much for being here. I'm very pleased that you're here and I too, as others have done, thank you for your service to Canadians and to the country.

You mentioned something right at the top of your comments, something that I think almost every other witness has talked about. That is that families are given short shrift in this charter. I liked how you put it—“deploy members and you're deploying families”, that it's exactly the same thing.

I don't want to put you on the spot, and you can maybe get back to us later, but I'm wondering whether there is language that you'd like to see in the charter that would reflect this very same thing?

[Senator Roméo Dallaire]

You can simply cut and paste to get the words, if I may suggest that—and not flippantly—the words are there.

I did not throw out the point that if you deploy the individual you deploy their families without considering its impact, remembering that historically we had the concept that if the army wanted you to have a family, they would have issued you with one, and that then we started to realize that it might be nice if the member were able to go home when his wife was having a baby so that they could share that experience together. That was a major thrust. We had people not liking it at all.

Now we have members who can have paternal leave, even. I'm still reeling under that one, but anyway....

The social scenario significantly changed. But with that social scenario, so also has the whole realm of communications changed, meaning that you're no more isolated from your family when you're in operational theatres, because the family can actually see it and live it and stream it and so on.

So they are deployed. They're sitting at home, but they're deployed; they're on standby. Every time somebody mentions somebody injured, they're reacting, all the the time. I had two of my children needing help when I got back. I came back and was nowhere near the same person I had been when I left, but the family wasn't the same either.

So I'll go to the extent of saying that if you deploy a member into an operational theatre, then you take on the responsibility for the family. So whatever deal you work out with the provinces for the member, you had better be working out a deal also for the family.

[John Rafferty, NDP, Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON]

Thank you for that.

I also want to thank you for earlier, with Mr. Hayes' question, defining the difference between a social contract and a social covenant, because they are very different things.

My next question involves reservists. We've heard from almost all the witnesses that reservists, once they've been deployed and come back, are not treated the same as regular members. I wonder what language could go into this charter to ensure that reserve members who see action are treated the same as regular members.

In Thunder Bay we have a large reserve garrison, and many of those reservists fought in Afghanistan. Three of them were killed in Afghanistan. So I think everyone understands that they are no different from regular force members.

What could we put in the charter that would ensure that this is in it?

[Senator Roméo Dallaire]

I've served with the reserves as a captain helping units, I've served as a lieutenant-colonel at area headquarters, and I commanded the whole province of Quebec, which had all the reserve forces of that province in it. Then, as deputy commander of the army, of course I had all the resource requirements for the reservists.

There is a fundamental problem when you build the system to meet your regular force people and then ask how we adapt it to the reserves. That just has been proven ineffective—from pay to whatever support they get in the units to, in fact, how they're even being treated and analyzed, when they come back from the same operational theatre, having bled the same as everybody else, but don't necessarily have that all-encompassing framework around them, because the reservist is in Matane and Valcartier is 300 kilometres away.

I think what you may need to be considering is that the forces perhaps have to look first at how to handle the problem with the reserves. How do we give them the support they need? They are now 20% to 25% of our operational troops.

When I went to the reserves in 1971, they were not allowed to shoot their guns—I'm artillery—unless a regular force guy was there, and they still had Korean War equipment. Now they are out there fighting, commanding, and engaged at all levels like our regular force guys, to the extent of up to 25%. That's not an insignificant number. This is not just a couple of guys here and there; these are significant numbers. As an honorary colonel of a regiment, with 200 guys in my regiment I had 49 deployed in Afghanistan. And we have no capabilities—none—permanently to really do it.

We create honorary colonels. We use our own money to pay for transport for guys to get to different places. I would argue that maybe they should reverse the angle of this for once, because they're doing a major study now, a five-year study on reserve and regular forces, trying to integrate the two—which we were doing in the nineties, too—and ask: what do the reserves need to meet the requirement? You can adjust that to the regular force in a heartbeat.

I think that's the way to look at it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much.

Now we go to our last questioner.

Mr. Galipeau, please; you have six minutes.

[Royal Galipeau, Conservative, Ottawa—Orléans, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Senator, for coming down to talk to a bunch of commoners like us and share your wisdom with us.

I want you to know that, before you became a senator and I became a member of Parliament, I was already seeking out your wisdom. I attended some of the lectures you gave at the University of Ottawa. So it was still refreshing to hear from you today.

I did a quick study of the interim report published by your senate committee in March 2013. I would especially like to discuss recommendation 6, which reads as follows:

The Government of Canada consider streamlining the way that veterans are able to access the internal appointment process throughout the federal public service and ensure that veterans are given priority and assistance in the process.

Although the government has not yet tabled its response to your report, I am proud of what the government has done and of the commitment shown by the Minister of Veterans Affairs.

In November, we introduced Bill C-11, Priority Hiring for Injured Veterans Act, which effectively gives priority to injured veterans in the public service hiring process.

Our government has gone a step further with Bill C-27, finally allowing our highly trained soldiers, sailors, and air personnel access to internal federal public service job competitions. Additionally, these remarkable men and women will also be eligible for preferential hiring when competing against an equally qualified Canadian in an externally posted competition.

Your recommendation 9 is the following:

Veterans Affairs Canada consider involving more veterans throughout Canada to enhance the relevance of their outreach activities.

Can you clarify “to enhance the relevance of their outreach activities”?

[Senator Roméo Dallaire]

Allow me to use a few English terms.

[Royal Galipeau, Conservative, Ottawa—Orléans, ON]

I can give you the text in English, if you like.

[Senator Roméo Dallaire]

I have it here.

In 1993, members of the forces were not allowed to join the public service because, as it was called, it was a “khaki parachute”, and the priorities at the time were to hire women and visible minorities.

The military were coming in too qualified to do the jobs, so they were overwhelming the promotion flow within the public service, and we were cut out. Subsequently, we tried to introduce priority. We have seen the legislation come by, and the minister has been quite vocal about that.

There is a dimension that has to be covered very clearly in this. It has to come in, in the public service act, as a formal directive that all deputy ministers must apply, because for everything that was done previous to this, deputy ministers could decide whether or not they wanted to play. They had the overall authority. Unless this is going to guarantee that every deputy minister is going to play, just like with the Charter of Rights and its four criteria.... In fact, one of those criteria says to hire people who are disabled. Unless this act is going to say “that is an order and that's what you will apply”, it will not be very much better than what we had before.

The second side of that is, how does an infantryman compete for a public service job without being a commissionaire or something like that? Part of that legislation has to be an insurance that the individuals are given the opportunity to retrain, under either the Veterans Charter or some alignment thereof, so that they are still competitive. They could be hired, but then they could also be fired, because they're not being hired as indeterminates. They don't get to be indeterminate automatically.

If you don't guarantee a training capability so that, one, they are competitive, and, two, they can feel in their own esteem that they are doing a good job because they're qualified for it, I think the legislation might be weak. I think you have to watch out for those two angles, because they're the ones that permitted departments to get away without it.

To disseminate information to veterans, we suggested that veterans be hired to go speak at units and all over.

We created—against a lot of the therapists, the professionals—the peer support system. The peer support system is veterans who are helping other veterans, peers, to the extent where we've estimated that peer support has prevented a suicide attempt a day—a day. That's peer support. So what you need is for Veterans Affairs to get a whole bunch of peers under contract to go and just swamp the forces and the places where we know there are veterans and then sell the product. That's really what we were talking about. Because all the other tools are simply not effective.

[Royal Galipeau, Conservative, Ottawa—Orléans, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I had 14 other questions, but I'll let it go.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

We, by committee, agreed to have an hour with the senator. We know that we could spend a lot longer.

We do have four separate presentations to follow, so I'm going to say, Senator Dallaire, that we really, really appreciate it. And please, if there's anything further you want to send along, any other comments, we'd appreciate getting them, because your time here today is very valuable.

[Senator Roméo Dallaire]

Mr. Chair, thank you. I only want to say that when those body bags come back, or when our veterans come back injured, that we treat them and their families with dignity and respect...and that they don't have to fight again to live decently as an injured veteran in our country.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much.

We're going to suspend for a couple of minutes as we change.