Veterans Affairs Committee on Feb. 26th, 2015

[Mélanie Witty]

If you're voluntarily releasing, we call it the rehab-need gateway, and we have to answer three questions. Is there an injury, is it linked to service, and is that injury a barrier to re-establishment in civilian life?

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

So this again is always focused on an injury.

What if you're not injured and you want to get re-educated? You're not injured, there's nothing wrong with you, you're releasing voluntarily after 12 years, for life circumstances or whatever, and you don't know where the hell you're going to go, or what you're going do, what services are available? Can you get re-educated?

[Mélanie Witty]

With my authority as a case manager, I cannot deem the member eligible if he doesn't meet that gateway for this program.

We talked about career transition services. The $1,000 maximum, that might be where we tap into it. There are lots of charities out there. The Prince Charles charity is for anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur. If you've served in CF, you go to that workshop for a few weeks in Halifax or Manitoba and you get a chance to meet with other members who have released, are gainfully employed, and self-employed. If that fits into that category, then we know how to tap into our partners: Hire a Veteran, Helmets to Hardhats, and so on.

[Michel D. Doiron]

They are not eligible for rehab at that point. We encourage them to apply anyway and put their name in, because you never know what happens 20 years down the road; something may show up after the fact; however, if they're just being honourably released and everything is fine, they're not eligible for rehab.

However, as Mélanie said, there is the MET program. We work with a lot of private sector industries that are veteran-friendly. There are many jobs, and we encourage them.... I have resources embedded within Canadian companies to find jobs and to work with veterans on getting jobs. But in that case, they would not be retrained. The $1,000 is available, but the other slew of programs is not, at that point.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Royal Galipeau]

After seven and a half minutes, now it is time for Mr. Opitz.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for being here. I appreciate it; it's very informative.

Just along the lines of what my colleague was saying, perhaps we should start the mandatory part of the SCAN a little earlier. What do you think?

If a member joins the regular force or reserve, right at the beginning of their intake some of this information should be disseminated on a mandatory basis and probably repeated every year. Both the regular force and reserve units are required to have a security briefing, a fire briefing, this briefing, and that briefing. I think a VAC briefing is something that would be useful. It could be included as well if, for example, a troop were deploying into a DAG, a Departure Assistance Group. You go through the checklist so that you can “DAG green” and deploy, but providing knowledge of what's available to them should they be injured on tour might be something we could do.

Can I get your thoughts on that?

[Michel D. Doiron]

Before they deploy, they go through all their insurance and they meet with us. But I agree that whether it's SCAN or something similar, it's important.

SCAN is not just about our services. It's about their pension plan, it's about their medical plan, it's about a multitude of things. As the ex-DG of the federal public service pension plan, I always encourage people to take the pre-retirement seminars early, not when you're hitting 50 and you're going to leave at age 55. My personal feeling would be the same for SCAN: the earlier you could get at least some preliminary information—perhaps not the full three days, but some of that important information—the better.

What we are doing presently is working with the Canadian Armed Forces to increase awareness of the importance of documentation. This is not SCAN; we're actually going to bases and making sure that the senior leadership—not just the officers, but senior NCOs—get the message to their members to document. It's not SCAN, but we are doing that also.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Along the lines of documentation, we know that sometimes attributing things to service is the problem. Sometimes you could be missing a CF 98 that hadn't been filled out—I probably forgot to fill out a whole bunch of them. There are many things that are attributable to service that soldiers don't even report. You jump off the skid of a helicopter, and the next thing you know, you fall into a ditch and your ankle is sprained or broken or something like this. Sometimes, if it's serviceable, a day or two later the guys just don't bother to report it, but the damage could occur later on. It's things of that type.

How do you work to reconcile the fact that some of that documentation...? It's not always the soldier, either. Sometimes the document or the file literally disappears, to reappear three or four years later.

[Michel D. Doiron]

Thank you, sir.

Since about July I've been working with the new evidence-based model for adjudications, which is to accelerate. What we are also doing is working with our colleagues at CAF to use the military occupational codes so that we can start identifying.... I think they use new terminology now. They keep calling it MOC, but I think it has different initials now.

If you've been an infantryman or woman and have humped however many thousands of miles, it would be reasonable to assume certain injuries. We're working with the military institute of research to ask what we could expect to see, and we want to put that information to adjudicators when they're looking at the file: is this a reasonable injury to expect?

We're not quite there yet. With PTSD we're much more advanced, because it's easier to link a little bit to some things. We're looking right now at musculoskeletal injuries in knees and shoulders—the back is more complicated, to be honest—because you have had the packsack on for.... We're working on this and working with our colleagues at CAF to see what the job description of a certain person is and what the most common injuries are that link to it.

What we have done for PTSD is run it against our system and ask how often we would approve it. If you have a 99% approval rate for a certain injury to an infantryman or woman.... There's a certain logic.

We're working on it. We're not quite there yet, but we're working on it.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

I applaud that.

Over the past 30 years, some of the equipment we had in the beginning compared to some of the stuff they're being issued now, which is just state-of-the-art, excellent, load-bearing kit.... But back in the day when you were wearing a jump ruck on some of the older things, things were not balanced on your body...the boots and so on and so forth. These things do literally add up on the person's skeletal frame.

If you get to that it would eliminate a lot and help you get to the “yes” answer to my colleague's point a lot faster. As we understand, sometimes “no” is the thing.

When you do say no, can you give us just a broad general example of why?

[Michel D. Doiron]

We ask for the medical file and the service file when we review a certain condition, so when the person applies with a condition, we review the file. Hearing aids are not a good example, but if a person says, “I hurt my back”, we'll go through the file to ask if they have met with a doctor, and because of your back is there a form in there that says you had an accident, which we can look at? If the forms are there, it's quite easy. If the forms are not there, we'll look at other evidence. Did you serve somewhere that would make us believe that?

What we've implemented since July is that our adjudicators are now calling the individual before saying no. It's been a bit of a culture change, I will admit, but now they're calling the individual and saying, “Michel, I see you've applied because of a bad back. I can't find anything in your file. Can you substantiate your claim because there is nothing here. Can you get us something?”

Instead of having them go through all the levels of appeals.... And it's hurting my stats a little bit because I have to put the file aside and they have 90 days to answer, so it's not automatic. We're really trying to get to that yes.

But if at the end of the day the soldier cannot demonstrate that it was service related, that there is nothing on the service file or the health file or the psychiatric file—there are three files we work with, depending on the case—then the answer will be no.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

Just following up on that, sometimes that's tough to do. As I said, sometimes the troop doesn't say that something is wrong. He just carries on. But somebody may have seen it. A guy in his platoon says, “Oh yes, I remember when this guy fell down that trench and all of a sudden his knee blew out”. Would a statutory declaration from somebody who had had seen it—a commander or a platoon commander or that sort of thing—be considered as legitimate substantiation?

[Michel D. Doiron]

That is considered legitimate.

The other thing that not a lot of people know is that I have two liaison officers in my office so the adjudicators use them often. Let's say they see an injury or a situation they don't understand. I have a lieutenant-colonel and I have a senior chief, and these two individuals often sit with the adjudicator.

The adjudicator will ask, is this possible? Sometimes it's not. The guy will say, no, that never happens. They've been around. These guys are 30-year serving members. Often they will say, yes, that is actually what has happened, it's easy to see: let me make a phone call or go here and I'll get some information for you.

That's with the liaison officers. I have the same thing with the RCMP in my office.

[Ted Opitz, Conservative, Etobicoke Centre, ON]

You do work with the Legion, as I know, to help you with these. I think the Legion has always had a very historic role in dealing with veterans, and of course we've now turned a corner, post-Afghanistan mission and all these other things. I think the Legion has a tremendous amount to offer here as well. Of course, I'd like to see a lot of the troops join the Legion on their way out the door, but that's something the Legion's own recruitment is going to have to work on.

I'm done, Mr. Chair. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Royal Galipeau]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Stoffer.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you both very much for coming.

Sir, how many case managers do we have in the country now?

[Michel D. Doiron]

We have 226.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

What is the average caseload?

[Michel D. Doiron]

The average last month was 1 in 34.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

If I do the math very quickly.... I'm just trying to do this as quickly as I can. I'm not in school anymore.

[Michel D. Doiron]

We have approximately 7,300 case-managed veterans,.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

Okay, so DVA has a client base of about 200,000, give or take a few.

[Michel D. Doiron]

Yes, sir.

[Peter Stoffer, NDP, Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS]

There are roughly 680,000 veterans, RCMP, and dependent spouses in the country, so of the 200,000 who are actual clients of DVA, approximately 7,000 are case-managed.