Veterans Affairs Committee on April 3rd, 2014

[Thomas MacEachern]

Not at the time. To clarify, when she did come forward for the psychological help, she was given the loss benefit allowance as well—lost wages. That was the money the letter came out to claw back after her death. She had been receiving that for...I want to say six or eight months.

[Parm Gill, Conservative, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

Can you tell us how much that was?

[Thomas MacEachern]

It was a few thousand a month. It was her full pay from her last rank as corporal. The reason for that small amount was that she did not have a full military pension even though she would have qualified. When she was “5(f)ed” the original time, they essentially said, “Here's the paper. Sign here.” So she was walking out the door with nothing basically. She signed for her pension and took her pension out. There's a period during which you can buy back into your pension. By the time she got back in and was allowed to rejoin, the period had elapsed.

Her second tours were thus between Class A, Class B, and reserve, so she was never able to fully get back onto a full pension. That's a whole other issue: the difference in pension for reservists versus for regular force members and the problems that brings up, especially, as was mentioned earlier, when you have reservists fighting side by side with regular force people, and these guys get a pension and these ones don't. That's a whole other story.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you, Mr. Gill.

Ms. Mathyssen go ahead now for six minutes, please.

[Irene Mathyssen, London—Fanshawe, NDP]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all the witnesses.

It's been a very emotional thing listening to your testimony. I do have a number of questions. I want to preface them with some specific experience of mine as an MP with a veterans hospital in my riding. Parkwood is in my riding.

I meet modern-day vets all the time. The reason I meet them is that they've been denied long-term care. They've been denied support at that veterans hospital.

One in particular—a colonel, a Cold War pilot, one of those people who flew along the Iron Curtain day after day—would have been 80 or 81. He required surgery for his back because of what the surgeon said was a service-related injury. He ended up in a wheelchair. He couldn't go home because there was no facility at home for him. There was no long-term care bed in a provincial nursing home. He was told, “Sorry, you have to leave”.

So we fought to allow him to stay at Parkwood, to get a long-term care bed. With a lot of persistence and a lot of good people fighting for him, he was finally given that bed at a cost. He had to pay for the bed, and Veterans Affairs had the audacity to say, “Don't worry, Neil, you're not taking up a bed of a veteran. You're not forcing a veteran from a bed here at Parkwood.”

My concern is that Neil and so many others—and perhaps your spouse, Mr. MacEachern—are not receiving the long-term care they need, whether it's emotional care or physical care, and that's simply wrong. Modern-day veterans should indeed have that long-term care. I've taken this up with the minister, and I've consistently heard the same response, as recently as last night during a debate, that we have provincial health care services and that they should be looking after our veterans.

Can you comment? Do you believe it is the purview of the province to look after our modern-day veterans?

[Thomas MacEachern]

No, I think it's a federal responsibility since they are federal employees. Coming back to the covenant, if there were such a thing as the army of Alberta, then perhaps that would be their problem. In this case, it's a federal jurisdiction, and the sad thing is that we seem to be off-loading it to the provinces. If they were able to do it, that would be fine, but they're not, because they're all in financial crisis for various reasons, Alberta notwithstanding, including the way that money has been spent and allocated and the fact that their priorities have changed over the years.

I like to cite the example of how Ralph Klein, when he was premier, closed more hospitals in Alberta, a growing province, than he opened, including psychiatric care facilities. They closed the mental hospitals and turned people out onto the streets. Guess what? We have an issue with mental health in the streets in Calgary. Now social agencies are having to build huge hostels—there are three of them now—downtown that are taking care of people who probably should be in psychiatric facilities.

In her case, there was a two-month waiting list to get into that facility. We had some hope, but somebody dropped the ball. That's not uncommon. Again with workloads and beds....

And it's not only that. They don't have the expertise. They don't have the frame of reference for PTSD issues. In her case—and we still contend that it was service-related because of things that happened in service—it was quite a different case, but that aside, there's no frame of reference for them. Our own family doctor didn't know about this stuff and said we had to go find somebody who knew more about it.

[Irene Mathyssen]

Senator Dallaire talked about the culture, about the reality, the camaraderie of military life and how important that is in terms of care. I have to say that this level of care is available at Parkwood. The problem is there's not enough. It's one wing, beds are being closed, and the psychological care is not there. People are waiting months and months and months in order to access it. It seems to me that it comes down to dollars and cents.

One of the things that struck me, Mr. O'Connor, when you were talking about the Last Post Fund, was that the reductions in 1995 were because of budget cuts, this need to balance the budget. We're hearing that over and over again. Are we sacrificing our veterans for a balanced budget because we're not willing to pay the financial costs of real care?

[Col Daniel O'Connor]

It's worse than that. This is an observation, is all it is. I'm not throwing stones at anybody. Not only was it cut in half in 1995 arbitrarily to balance the budget, but one would think, then, a few years later it would have been reinstated because the budget was balanced. That didn't happen. But the worst is that it wasn't indexed after that, and that $12,000 today is about $8,000 in today's dollars. It's paltry. Somebody who dies with $9,000 is ineligible in terms of 1995 dollars, so it's an insult. That's the way I see it. As I said, it's just an observation; it's a rational observation. That's what happened. It was cut in half arbitrarily, never reinstated, and not even indexed. It's an insult.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much, Ms. Mathyssen.

Mr. Hawn, please, for six minutes.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you all for being here.

Mr. MacEachern, again, my personal condolences.

I just want to clarify one thing. When your wife was 5(f) released, did she get return of contributions? Because the pension thing, there's something on that.

[Thomas MacEachern]

Yes, that's what it was. You got the option—

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

You got a lump sum return of contributions.

[Thomas MacEachern]

You should take it all, yes.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Okay, that explains it.

One of the issues we just talked about was a federal government responsibility to provide health care for veterans. We transfer billions and billions of dollars to the provinces to provide health care. If we were ever to embark on—and the military got out of certainly veterans' dependent health care many years ago—reinstating that system, it would be countless billions of dollars, and it's just not doable. Maybe we need to do something. I have issues with some of the long-term care in Alberta, where we're not giving priority for beds to modern-day veterans, and I think that's an issue. But I don't think it's practical for us to go back and reinvent a veterans' dependent health care system. That is truly not affordable.

Mr. O'Connor, I totally support your recommendations there with respect to their being reasonable and sensible.

Mr. Kokkonen, and I guess General Gollner, on the insurance company mentality, and I've spoken about this before, the issues to me are not so much what's there, because there's a lot actually there, but we make it too difficult to access. We put the burden of proof too high. The insurance company mentality comes in where you have to come in and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are worthy of getting whatever it is. Do you think it's ever possible for us to reverse that philosophy? If somebody comes in with an injury or whatever, and it's reasonable, just get the benefit going, continue to do the due diligence, and if at the end of the day the person is not reasonably eligible, don't claw it back, but just stop it. Do you think if we just reverse that philosophy, get it going and worry about the fine details later, that we'd have the majority happy, instead of the majority, or a large number, at least, cranky?

[Ray Kokkonen]

We've heard to solve the problem and work out the details after, a number of times this afternoon. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by “reversing the philosophy”.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Instead of having to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, accept the story, because most people are going to be honest. There will be people who game the system and that's just the way it is.

[Ray Kokkonen]

This applies to VAC as well as for VRAB— the same concept.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

[Ray Kokkonen]

The Veterans Ombudsman had it all solved in this article in the paper two days ago, and that's what it was. It was reversing that particular “prove beyond reasonable doubt everything”. Of course, in the same vein, that was the problem with VRAB, too. The benefit of doubt was being exercised in a reverse manner in dealing with the case, and, of course, we dealt with that one previously so....

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

General Gollner, is there anything you'd like to add on that?

[BGen Joseph Gollner]

The Veterans Ombudsman has published a number of really quite thoughtful and well-researched papers over the past year about the problems in the new Veterans Charter. Recently, Mr. Parent came out with his proposal, which I suspect didn't come out by accident, saying, as Ray brought up a few minutes ago, we file our income taxes, you can apply for CPP, you can apply for student loans, and you can apply for a whole bunch of things. You can do it on the computer. Revenue Canada, at least the ones I deal with, are not particularly nice people if you fool around. They will come and audit you. If you file your taxes today, electronically, chances are you will probably get your refund or be told to pay more in three weeks' time.

When you can do it with something as fundamental as income tax, why shouldn't we be able to do it with something like applying for veterans benefits, as opposed to going through this bureaucratic system that they've set up? It's been developed over generations. It's not something that's come to us by accident. It's been built and built and built. I don't know how many people down in P.E.I. handle this paperwork but there must be a legion of them. It is a very complicated, fact-based process, that is difficult to do. We've heard complaints, and routinely hear complaints, of learned medical specialists' input on a veteran's application being turned down by a nurse. People are asking how that can happen. It's very simple, because the nurse is in the system and she has to look at the medical advice and see if it relates to the individual being on duty, so not necessarily criticizing the medical advice but its relationship to the individual being on duty.

I think we can do better. Ray called the Veterans Ombudsman's article a bombshell. I think it's more than that. If we could bring that about maybe we could get a return of the veteran's application in three weeks like most of us will get a return on our income tax.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Make it very brief.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Okay. Real short. I think it will be a short answer.

Do you have any thoughts on the suggestion of merging DND and VAC?

General Gollner, you may be the best one placed to answer the question.

[BGen Joseph Gollner]

That's not a new idea.

I think in 1987 or 1988 when I was in National Defence headquarters—and I'll use my common expression for it—or Fort Fumble on the Rideau, there was a green paper that was circulated within both ministries and we were asked to comment. It was being staffed within National Defence headquarters. I don't know whatever happened to that paper other than the fact that it was seriously reviewed. The consideration was that the two departments be legally joined and that there would be an associate minister of Veterans Affairs with the accompanying staff and all the rest of it.

It's not a new idea. It's been out there for a long time.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Mr. Hayes, please, for six minutes.