I think I can shed some light on the subject.
On December 7, 2010, I came to meet this committee and I explained all this. You can refer to what I said at that time.
DND is responsible for the active forces. When those soldiers leave the army, the responsibility passes to VAC. The problem is simple. Soldiers who are still active are told by the defence department, their regiment, or their battalion that they will be paid during the two-year transition from military to civilian life. However, nobody tells them that VAC will be able to take responsibility for them immediately thereafter.
So the person is in a stressful situation because they think that, once those two years have elapsed, there will no longer be any help. That's what the problem is. The way things really should work is that, when a soldier joins his or her unit or battalion—not when he or she is recruited into the forces, because that would be too early—there should be people designated by VAC to provide mandatory information sessions for them. That way, the soldiers will know that, if ever there's a psychological or physiological problem, they have a recourse. They are not just shown the door, like I was in 1992. This approach would dispel any uncertainty for them. Thanks to such VAC information sessions, they would know what help they can count on from their release onward.
I never got the benefit of a program. DND had nothing for me. I was simply sent home. Fourteen years went by before I was paid any benefits. These days, a person can get help after four weeks. This proves that VAC works very well. There's still a lot of work to do, and there are still many shortcomings to address, but it works. The key is to know how it works, however.
These days, there's a lot of focus on active military who are about to be released. The situation they face isn't so bad because they have at least two years in front of them without needing to be too concerned. They know that as soon as they leave the ranks, they'll be looked after. And yet I know people who have been waiting for three, four, five or seven years, and still haven't received a thing. They are completely destitute, and if we weren't there to look after them due to the fact that someone, by sheer happenstance, referred us to them, they'd no longer be part of the population. They would have hanged themselves.
Do you understand what I'm getting at? It's all well and good to have discussions about this, but everything that's been said up to this point was already said by me in 2010. Can we not make some progress now? Could we talk about real situations? There are people dying, and DND's response is that its statistics are not all up to date.
I'm not blaming DND, or VAC. However, a great many veterans are not being taken care of, and are ending up in hospitals in various provinces, having fallen between the cracks. Those veterans are not included in the statistics. So there's a huge gap that still needs to be filled. VAC needs to provide mandatory information sessions when the soldiers joins their unit, so the soldiers know they'll have access to the help they need one day.