Evidence of meeting #42 for Veterans Affairs in the 41st Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was work.
A recording is available from Parliament.
President, True Patriot Love Foundation
Do you mean the priority within government? Yes.
I don't know what the HR plans are. My concern with that would be, would you run into the same problem you'd run into in the private sector. Are the people who are looking at those resumés in government able to understand them and know the skills relevant to the position they're hiring for? I don't know if specific training happens with the HR people within government and the managers who are doing the hiring, but I would think you would need to have that to be successful.
Conservative
Wladyslaw Lizon Conservative Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON
From your experience with the private sector, with the corporations to date, what would you think are the main gaps that need to be filled to allow the process to run better? Is there a way to improve it? How? Is there a problem with employers accessing the information about the pool of veterans who are looking for work? Are there gaps on both sides, the veterans cannot get to the proper employers and the other way around?
President, True Patriot Love Foundation
One of the things we talk about in our report—and again, I'm not sure who would take this on; it's fairly expensive to do—is some good marketing and advertising around this. The United States have done some of it whereby they show a veteran saying what they did in the military and here's what they're doing today, and you see what the position was in the military and you see what the veteran's title is now and say “wow”. From the veterans' standpoint they say that's them, they should do that, and they wouldn't have thought of that. Also from the employer's standpoint, it starts to make it a little more real and understandable.
I think marketing is a really big piece of this. We need to be telling employers that by hiring veterans there's an opportunity to improve their bottom lines. They might not realize the pool of talent there. I also think the marketing has to happen for the veterans too, to encourage them to think outside the box a bit. Just because this is what they did in the military, there are some soft skills they might not realize are relevant to potential jobs outside the military.
Conservative
Conservative
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Royal Galipeau
—when you're having fun. That's it for you.
Before I recognize Mr. Rafferty, I'd ask the committee to stay in their seats after the presentation. We have distributed a copy of a budget to each of you, and so after this presentation I'll ask for a motion to have this budget approved.
Mr. Rafferty, it's your turn.
John Rafferty NDP Thunder Bay—Rainy River, ON
Thank you, Ms. Evans, for being here. It's certainly appreciated.
I only have one question for you, and it's in relation to Mr. Lizon's question. It's about hiring of veterans in the private sector, particularly medically released veterans.
Do you think there's a role for government in the hiring of medically released veterans in the private sector, somehow, as you think about it?
President, True Patriot Love Foundation
We've done quite a bit of work. There are lots of different things out there. Take a program like Prospect's, for example. This one has proven to be the most successful. It's scalable. The cost per person for placing an individual is probably about $1,500, which is not bad. I think it's a program that government should be looking quite seriously at making national. I don't necessarily see government delivering it, but rather, contracting with this organization that has a great track record in doing this. I think that's the role for government.
Government does do some placements in the private sector, through the joint personnel support units and their return-to-work programs. Many of them are unpaid because the individual is still employed by the Canadian Armed Forces. We've had a couple come to work in our office in internship positions. I think there are good intentions, but in my experience the people who are working in those programs aren't necessarily HR people. In my experience they didn't do a good job of preparing me for the individuals who were coming to work with us. Because as an organization we're sympathetic to the ill and the injured, we figured it out, but my feeling was that had it been a bank or somewhere else, say, they would have just said, “You know what? This isn't working for me. I don't really know what this is about.”
I think it's more about the government getting behind the right program, which is delivered by a third party.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Royal Galipeau
Mr. Hawn has generously offered his first minute to Mr. Lizon so he can finish.
Conservative
Conservative
Wladyslaw Lizon Conservative Mississauga East—Cooksville, ON
It's just a quick question that I have. Several organizations were formed to help veterans, Soldier On, Red Fridays, Wounded Warriors, etc. Do you have any platform of collaboration? Do you work together on projects or not? How does it work? It looks as if some of the work is fragmented and some services may be overlapping.
President, True Patriot Love Foundation
We work very closely with all of those organizations. I think we're all pretty careful.
To people on the outside it probably seems more disjointed than it does to us who are in this sector. Canada Company, for example, is probably the organization I deal with the most. I frequently send an email to it to say somebody has approached me, that a veteran is either looking for a job or there's a company wanting to hire, and I do the hand-off that way.
We're pretty coordinated in a lot of respects. We each have our own mandate. We do see each other quite frequently, meet quite frequently, and collaborate on issues.
Soldier On wasn't, but most of the rest were involved in the Veterans Transition Advisory Council. I do think we're quite coordinated, although I could understand how people externally might.... I mean, it's just not that transparent to people.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
Thanks so much for what TPL does, and your role in it.
This is a question you probably can't answer, but you talked about Prospect and taking it nationally and so on, which I think certainly has merit. Do you have any idea what Prospect spends every year and then obviously what it would be to take it national?
President, True Patriot Love Foundation
Yes, I do, and I could get you the exact numbers. I don't have them with me. We are paying the full cost for the program this year, which is $250,000 for Edmonton.
Conservative
President, True Patriot Love Foundation
Yes. When they go national there obviously are going to be opportunities to scale it and to create some efficiencies in terms of number of staff. You can imagine how that would work. When we started working together and said that we were willing to work with them to get the seed funding to take this national, we said that it's important to us that this be affordable over the long term. We said that we really wanted to see the placements happen at the $2,000 per person and under range, and they're coming in at about $1,800 now.
They made a huge investment in the first year. I think just between staff and one-time costs their first year was about $450,000, and this year it's $250,000. The idea is to make it about $1,800 a person.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
Do you have any feeling for how many Prospects it would take across the country?
President, True Patriot Love Foundation
Yes, we think we could do it by region. There's the one out west now. Our next one I think would be Ontario/Quebec. We would do one in Atlantic Canada, and possibly one more. It would be three to four sites.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
Do you think the Edmonton site could cover all of the west?
President, True Patriot Love Foundation
Yes, I'm trying to remember if they had a site planned for Vancouver or not. It may be able to.
Conservative
Laurie Hawn Conservative Edmonton Centre, AB
I'm just trying to get a feel for what we're talking about in gross terms.
We're talking about overlapping services and so on. Is that necessarily bad? If there are various people providing various services, and some of them overlap, it seems to me it may be a little confusing, but at least to me there would be less chance of somebody falling through the hole because somebody's going to get covered by something, somewhere.
President, True Patriot Love Foundation
The other thing I would say, too, is that especially when you're dealing with ill and injured veterans, the same thing doesn't work for every person. When we think about the different charities that we fund in the mental health space, last year we funded Paws Fur Thought, which is an organization that provides service dogs for veterans who are dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder. That's going to work for some veterans, and it works very well for them. It doesn't work well for everybody, so we'll find an Outward Bound program that works really well for people. There's a program of art therapy that we're not funding, but that's being funded out west.
I think it's important to recognize that—you're right—it perhaps may seem like there's some overlap with some of these, but when you're often dealing with mental health issues, you can't just provide a cookie-cutter solution and assume it's going to work for everybody.
