It's important to note that currently for Veterans Affairs.... You asked whether they might be able to come into play with DND. I can say from my personal experience as a reservist that there's no way to go but up.
When I first came home, there was no Veterans Affairs representative waiting for me. I didn't know the process. There was no one there until I finally talked to someone four years later. Having no representation there, I can say that there's definitely room to have someone there right now like that.
To get back to the question of where to start the process of having that career transition, there's no reason we can't start right at the basic training level, put an hour or two into the training assignment to start the career transition and the skills training right there.
One reason it takes so long to transition afterwards, when you have joined the military, rather than doing it the other way around, is that you literally get beaten into you what it's like to be in the military. You start talking military, you start literally exuding and living military. Then, when you come out and you meet an employer, you'll explain, “I'm a sergeant with an AWACS course and Task Force 308 experience.” This doesn't mean anything, unfortunately, to that corporate hire. You may have a CEO who is going to hire a thousand veterans a year for the next 10 years, but then it gets down to the HR level and they don't understand.
You can teach that veteran to talk corporate and to get that skills transition, but if you don't teach corporate Canada to speak a little military and to understand.... It's a two-way street. Right now we're only teaching the one way, and it's hitting a roadblock on the corporate side. We need to do it on both sides.