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.