Veterans Affairs Committee on Nov. 26th, 2013

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

So how would our workers' compensation package, writ large, compare with, say, the Brits. You mentioned the Brits. Is it equal or superior?

[Dr. Cameron Mustard]

These are always complicated questions to answer. With the exception of workers' compensation, the disability incomes, and Veterans Affairs, I think the benefit levels in most of the Canadian disability income programs are lower than international standards. But I think it's the case that for workers' compensation, for Veterans Affairs, the supports and services that are available to workers are stronger than most international standards.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Which promotes return to work and so on, which is the underlying tenet or your programs and Veterans Affairs programs.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Peter Stoffer]

Thank you, Mr. Hawn.

Now we'll move on to your colleague, Mr. Chisu, please, for five minutes.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much to the witnesses appearing in front of the committee.

I have a question for you. I served in Afghanistan, so I'm a veteran, but that doesn't make too much difference. But according to the universality of service principles, the members of the regular armed forces must be fit for deployment at all times and in any location where military operations are under way. If any disability prevents a member from being deployed abroad with his or her unit, the member must be considered essential for military solidarity.

So with public servants.... For example, there is the Treasury Board policy on the duty to accommodate persons with disabilities in the federal public service, and this applies for all federal public servants whose employer is the Treasury Board. This policy guarantees that the employer will take all necessary measures to keep the employee with a disability in his or her position. Members of the regular force are excluded from this policy because it would conflict with the universality of service principle.

Do you believe the difference between these two principles should result in different compensation and support programs for injured individuals? And how, in your opinion, is the new Veterans Charter addressing this issue, and what would be your recommendation to improve the new Veterans Charter?

[Dr. Cameron Mustard]

That's a good question. This is an issue that I would think would be more prominent in your minds than in mine, for example, which is equity among federal government employees and the reasons why the two principles are present within the armed forces and the Treasury Board. The distinction, perhaps, is maybe most helpful if we distinguish between Canadian Forces personnel who release from the military without a health consequence arising from their service, and that would be—

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

I'm sorry, but I was always offended by the fact that I was a serving military and I'm not a public servant, not considered a public servant. This is an insult.

[Dr. Cameron Mustard]

I hear you. I mean, I think I sit about where you are too. Do we know why this tradition exists that you're not a public servant? No.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Peter Stoffer]

I'll explain later.

[Judy Geary]

Could I add a comment? What you described is a fundamental question. It's not that the principle of universality that you described is in any way wrong, because people do need to be fit to go into war zones and that fitness has to be defined by people who understand what it requires. But the issue that you seem to me to be pointing out is the question of who the employer of an armed forces employed person is. Is it the army or the armed forces; is it the Department of National Defence or is it in fact the entire federal government? Is it the department that they're in, or is it the federal government?

Yes, I'd be very interested to know why it seems to have been defined that the employer is the armed forces or maybe the Department of National Defence, but not the entire government.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

In the case in which a reservist who is serving the country and has a contract but is not a full-time employee in the armed forces—and so is serving as a soldier only for a certain period of time—gets injured, does workers' compensation have any influence or make any contribution to their rehabilitation? I'm not looking only at Veterans Affairs; I'm looking also here at an injured person who has served the country. I think both organizations should be cooperating in rehabilitating this person.

[Judy Geary]

I'm not 100% certain about that. I suspect that if the reservist is called to full-time duty and their employer still maintains its employment relationship with them, they may have some entitlement to service from workers' compensation, and that may vary across the country as well.

[Corneliu Chisu, Conservative, Pickering—Scarborough East, ON]

Can you give us some information about that or provide it to the analyst?

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Peter Stoffer]

Thank you very much for that, sir.

I'm just going to give the analyst, who is a researcher too, Mr. Chisu, one quick minute to explain the public servant aspect. But then, for the committee's purposes, he will write something to us in more comprehensive language as to why military personnel are not legally considered public servants.

Go right ahead.

[Jean-Rodrigue Paré, Committee Researcher]

I will speak in French to avoid saying nonsense.

Those rates are explained by the separation of civilian and military authorities. Civilian authorities must always monitor military members' work. That creates a certain separation between various administrative authorities and leads to a distinction between civilian staff and military staff within the Department of National Defence. However, they are both subject to the ultimate authority, which is represented by the Queen of England in Canada. That is where the connection is established.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Peter Stoffer]

Thank you. That's the Coles notes version, and he'll have a more comprehensive response to that later on.

Mr. Chisu, thank you very much.

Now we'll move on to Madame Perreault, please, in our second round, for four minutes.

[Manon Perreault, NDP, Montcalm, QC]

Good afternoon. Thank you for being here.

You will understand that this discussion is very important to me. When an individual is disabled—regardless of what caused the disability, or whether they are a soldier or a civilian—the results and the consequences are the same.

I want to come back to what was said earlier. Some people work for the Canadian Forces and have another job in the civilian sector. If they have a serious accident, they will receive 75% of their income from the army, but will they be compensated for the income they were earning in the civilian sector?

[Judy Geary]

In workers' compensation policy, there is generally a term called concurrent employment. Rules are laid out about what happens when a person has two different jobs, which is certainly not uncommon, and has an injury in one of the jobs and becomes disabled from working in both jobs.

I'm not familiar with specific rules in every area, but generally both salaries would be considered when determining the rate of wage replacement that a person would get.

[Manon Perreault, NDP, Montcalm, QC]

In that case, will the province pay them 80% to 90%, or will the payment be made by the armed forces, at 75% of the income?

[Judy Geary]

I'm not certain. I don't know what the armed forces would cover.

But let's say the person was injured in his or her civilian job and couldn't do his or her reserve job. If that had a salary associated with it, the workers' compensation board would cover the full seven days of work for which he is losing payment.

[Manon Perreault, NDP, Montcalm, QC]

Okay.

I will move on to a completely different topic.

Earlier, we talked about individuals who were re-entering the labour market and ways to encourage people to work. At the beginning of your presentation, you talked about wage subsidies. I don't know what you think about that, but I am being told that wage subsidies are creating problems, simply because employers tend to hire someone and keep them only as long as they need to in order to receive a wage subsidy. Yet when that subsidy ends, those individuals will once again be unemployed. People tell me about problems they had after their accident and about feeling isolated from society. This makes them feel even more isolated and useless.

I would like to hear what you have to say about that.

[Dr. Cameron Mustard]

You've put your finger on a really important opportunity, and perhaps in this country we could attempt an experiment.

Think of two members of the Canadian armed forces who are releasing. One is releasing in perfect health, and the other is releasing with an impairment that's visible to an employer. They both go out in their community, whether it's St. Catharines, Chicoutimi, or Halifax, to seek employment. Unfortunately, the released member with the impairment is going to have a harder time getting an employment offer.

It's like dating. When an employer recruits a new staff person, he or she is not supposed to discriminate. They're not supposed to discriminate; that's the law. But choices are made. It is my strong view that there will be times when armed forces personnel with visible impairments will have a more difficult time finding employment than a released member without an impairment.

It might be that a small subsidy to employers to have a first date might work. Right? It might work.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Peter Stoffer]

Thank you, Mr. Mustard.

We'll get eHarmony to give you a call, and we'll see what we can do with this.

I'm just kidding. That was a good analogy, by the way.

We'll now move on to Mr. Lobb, please, for four minutes.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

One thought I've had is there's been a lot of talk today about WSIB and trying to compare it to the Veterans Charter. Maybe there are some similarities, maybe there aren't some similarities. But certainly from my work experience in an automotive parts manufacturing environment and working with the union, and actually still in my role today working with the union and trying to help out workers get fair treatment with WSIB, my gut would tell me the new Veterans Charter should try to do better than WSIB. I'm not slagging WSIB, but we should try to achieve higher than WSIB as far as outcomes and putting people back to work when they're ready are concerned. That's one of the key things I don't think anybody's talked about today.

If you are injured on the job, WSIB, if you're working with a case manager, their primary, number one job is to get you back to work. Let's not kid ourselves here. If you are a veteran, it could very well be, and it's probably a 99% chance of certainty, that you aren't working at this point in time and quite likely, if you have PTSD, for example, they're not even going to let you anywhere near a workplace. They don't want you to go back to work. They want you to get the treatment and the therapy that is required to get you into a sound state of mind before you even start to go into retraining, before they even consider you to be put into a workplace environment.

I think that is one of the key, fundamental differences when we're trying to look at WSIB versus the new Veterans Charter. That's one of the very first things. It's getting you back to work as quickly as you can with WSIB, and not even being in the workforce at this point and trying to get you into the right frame so you have a successful outcome. I just wanted to put that out there before I got into my question.

Once you have gone through that, so mentally and physically you're as good as you can be, the person who you're working with, or the group or team you're working with at Veterans Affairs, has deemed that you're ready to start to reintegrate yourself into the workforce, I want you to explain, Mr. Mustard or Ms. Geary, the importance to somebody to get back into that workforce, mentally, physically, emotionally. Because to pay somebody a pension and to let them fend for themselves is not likely the best outcome for that person. Getting them back into meaningful work or whatever they're able to do, seems to me.... Please explain your experiences over the years on that philosophy.

[Judy Geary]

I'm very strongly of the view that paying somebody a pension and then leaving them to their own devices is not helpful. I've met, and read research and commissioned research on, people who have pensions or income security of some kind and who aren't at work. Their lives generally are not necessarily happy. This is not a choice that they've made in the same way that people choose to retire from the workforce when the time comes.

The studies show that even if they have a pension they can continue to experience financial insecurity. It may not cover everything that they had before. They're not building a retirement pension because there's no money to do that with. So their long-term financial security is still affected even though there may be enough money to pay for today's room and board, and rent, and so on.

Many of them experience elevated levels of pain. If you take a person with a particular type of injury, with let's say a 20% evaluated permanent impairment, who's not working and a person who is working with exactly the same injury, evaluated with exactly the same level of impairment, the person who is not working will experience more pain than the person who is. They use more medication. They have higher rates of divorce and family breakdown, alienation from their children, spouses, parents, and social isolation. They can tend to become disconnected and disengaged from their communities and become isolated. They have elevated rates of depression and other mental health problems, anxiety and so on.

Even if they have the income, their lives are not necessarily fulfilling. They're not rewarding. They're not overall healthy lives.

That's a broad generalization because within any population there are going to be people who are thriving and doing very well and others who are not. But in general, from the studies that I've read and my own observation, income support is not the answer to what is required to create a healthy life.