Veterans Affairs Committee on Nov. 29th, 2018

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you both for coming. It is quite valuable to get this input from people who are basically on the ground dealing with these issues.

You made reference to the homelessness round table last June and some of the things that were talked about there, and you mentioned there was a lack of awareness of the services.

Do you have any ideas on how we could increase awareness among police forces across Canada? What kind of outreach should we do to the police, so that you know to direct veterans in this way?

[Cst Alyson Smith]

That's a great question.

There was a video that was played at the round table that I've passed on to a few people here in Vancouver. I thought it was really quite a powerful video. There were several officers, but there was an officer in Calgary who kind of stuck with me. I think maybe that would be a great medium to get the message out, as well as probably connecting with those of us who do specifically have the homeless outreach roles.

I know that across the country there are certainly members who are involved in community services or something like that. Reach out to those officers, get the word out that way, and then have them kind of pass it on to the rest of the department.

[Insp Colleen Yee]

You could also—because it seems like this is a national priority.... The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police has regular meetings. If someone from Veterans Affairs would present there, they would bring it back to their respective agencies and pass information downwards also, so that's another really good avenue.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Thank you.

In some of the earlier questions, this was touched upon. We've had some veterans groups identify that there are some homeless veterans who, due to a number of issues—possibly mental health—sometimes have had such a bad experience that they just don't trust the government and don't trust Veterans Affairs. They actually don't want the help. Have you had any experience with that? Have you identified someone who is a veteran, who is homeless, but who just basically brushes off any help you might offer?

[Cst Alyson Smith]

I haven't encountered anyone who specifically identified as a veteran, but certainly on a daily basis there are certain people who don't want our help, don't want services from anyone. They're happy living the way they are, whether it is because of their mental health or other issues at play. They are fine where they are. I usually check in and just make sure everything's still okay, but there certainly are people who are not interested in our services.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Thank you.

To the best of your knowledge, in your jurisdiction are there any veterans groups that are doing outreach in the street and helping to look for homeless veterans? I know there are some cities where they do that, where they will actually go out and try to seek out some of these homeless vets among the homeless population. Do you know of any groups like that in Vancouver?

[Cst Alyson Smith]

I'm not familiar with any, no.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Thank you.

I have another minute, I think.

This may be difficult as well, because this is something that is very difficult to track. We've talked about the interplay between mental health and homelessness. We know a very large proportion of the overall homeless population has underlying mental health issues that have led to their decline and their homelessness. Is there any data in your jurisdiction on whether this is more so or less so with the homeless veterans?

[Cst Alyson Smith]

Not that I'm aware of. Our Vancouver Coastal Health services might be keeping track of it. There's often a challenge in information sharing between our organizations.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

All right.

That's my time. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Thank you.

I'd also now like to welcome Matthew Pearce, president and chief executive officer from Old Brewery Mission in Montreal. Mr. Pearce will give his testimony for 10 minutes, and then we'll swing back to questions.

If our other guests can wait, then we've still got about 20 minutes for questions. Mr. Pearce said he'll stay afterward for the next committee. His train leaves around 5:30, so he'll give us some more time to take some questions that he's missed.

Mr. Pearce, the floor is yours.

[Matthew Pearce, President and Chief Executive Officer, Old Brewery Mission]

Thank you very much.

First of all, thank you very much for the invitation to speak with you this afternoon.

I'll be happy to answer your questions, in French

or in English.

I plan to take about 10 minutes to go over a couple of things that I hope will be helpful to the committee.

First off, I'll perhaps just give you a very, very quick overview of the Old Brewery Mission. Some of you may not have heard of it, but it is Quebec's largest service for homeless men, and it's Canada's largest service for homeless women.

We began in 1889. We were founded then due to the growth of homelessness in Montreal at that time. I think we've realized now that we were kind of on the wrong track around homelessness for about 112 of those 130 years. We provided overnight shelter and we provided meals and a change of clothing. People could use our services for free for an unlimited amount of time. When you have no other alternative, it's a very important, even life-sustaining service, but we realized that if that's all we're offering, it's facilitating homelessness.

We realized we needed to do something more in our service offering than just offer those basic emergency services, and so we shifted our focus to moving people off the street. Today, housing is the single largest thing we do.

Getting to the point of veterans and homelessness, we responded to the federal study that came out, I think, in January of 2015 or 2016—I forget the year—that revealed that according to that study, there were about 2,250 homeless veterans on the street. It had not been on our radar prior to that study coming out. Of course we knew about it, because we'd seen some come through our doors, but we weren't really familiar with the magnitude of the problem, so we dug into our database. We dug into the profiles of the people who were staying within our walls, both men and women. We realized that about 2% of our population were veterans, and that would mean about 45 people.

We put together a program idea to move homeless veterans out of homelessness and back into homes, and, in an adapted way, to the housing programs we already offered. We pitched it to Minister Duclos' ministry's homelessness partnering strategy, and it was embraced and accepted in the context of the innovation fund the ministry had created.

We put in place what we call the “sentinels of the streets”, a program that is intended to house about 18 to 20 homeless veterans. The idea was that it would be a project that, if successful, might play the role of a model for implementation across Canada.

We forged partnerships along with Minister Duclos' ministry of Families, Children and Social Development. We forged partnerships with the Quebec Veterans Foundation, with VETS Canada, and then through our other urban health programs through the hospital system. As you probably heard from the testimony you've already received, mental illness and serious drug addictions are a part of the profile of many of the people we serve and many of the people who are veterans and are homeless.

We set about not just finding a way to house 18 or 19 veterans; we set about ending veterans' homelessness in Montreal. We thought that if we were seeing about 45 a year and we're the largest resource, then there might be another five or six who aren't coming to our doors and are going to other doors. However, we're seeing the lion's share of the homeless veteran population in Montreal. We think that kind of number is quite manageable to eliminate.

If we keep veterans on our radar, as we will do, we'll see them when they come in, and they won't stay inside our walls for very long. We'll move them into housing.

I think it's important to understand that the idea is to end veteran homelessness, and that's what we pitched to the federal government.

Of course, we weren't experts in veterans matters, and we had to go on a fairly steep learning curve to effectively become responsive to the population we were serving. We underwent a number of lessons early on. One of the things that I think is interesting for this group is that there were a lot of false declarations: A lot of people said they were a veteran and had a veteran's experience and could even tell a fairly detailed story, yet we found out they weren't veterans.

We found out that having people vetted, if you'll pardon the pun, to see if they were in fact veterans by going through VAC was a long, arduous and time-consuming process. You have to understand that if somebody's homeless inside a shelter, whether they're a veteran or not, they may not linger in that condition for very long. If you can't respond to them very quickly, you'll lose them and they'll disappear. We had cases that took as much as two months to verify. We did lose some veterans in the process, who may have resolved their homelessness on their own, but they didn't participate in the sentinels program.

We learned that most of the people who were coming to our doors as veterans and were turning out to be veterans had not had combat experience. Only one of the 14 people we now house had any combat experience.

We learned that these are tough cases, that most of them had left the military perhaps a decade ago. These are not people with recent military experience.

We learned that the model works. We are able to house even these tough cases and we think it's a successful and highly cost-effective model, but it can be more cost-effective. If I have some time, I'll explain how I think that could happen.

A number of people who are veterans are homeless and do not use the resources. They do not come to the shelters. Mr. Eyolfson, I think you mentioned that point when you questioned my Vancouver colleagues. Many do not use those resources for a number of reasons that we've been able to discern, and they have a lot to do with both shame and pride in a paradoxical way. They're ashamed that they have fallen on these hard times when they were given so many skills and abilities that they thought would translate into civilian life and I guess didn't. They also learned survival skills. If anybody's adept at living out on the streets, it's probably our veterans, and so in some ways they employ those skills and stay out of shelters.

With the new VAC family well-being fund, we received funds to hire a person who will now go out beyond our walls, under those bridges and into those encampments, to meet veterans and develop a link of confidence with them and bring them to us. We've just received the confirmation of funding, so we'll be putting that in place as well.

I have a couple of recommendations, and that will conclude my presentation.

The first one is not to think of this as a homeless problem first, but as a veteran's problem first. This issue belongs at VAC. Homelessness is a symptom of someone whose life has fallen off the rails. It's not who they are; it's what they're dealing with right now. Obviously, the homelessness has to be resolved, but it's not the core issue.

I've said it before: I think we should be focusing not on better managing homelessness for veterans, but ending it. Even the national numbers are manageable, if they turn out to hold up at 2,000 to 2,250. Ask organizations like ours to transform our services such that when they come to our doors, they don't stay any longer in homelessness than they have to. In doing so, we can end homelessness.

Get good, reliable data. Expect impact from funds. Measure progress towards measurable goals, and adjust the goals and actions as our knowledge improves, because our knowledge isn't great around veteran homelessness. This committee is building knowledge, and it will be a very important mechanism to do that. However, we can't run on anecdotes; we should be running on good data, and we can obtain that.

Where funding is available, extend the funding horizons. Our project, the sentinels of the street, was funded for one year and then extended for another year, which is terrific, but when you are offering someone housing and you can't offer it to them for a long enough period of time....

As I said, these are tough cases. They don't resolve in 12 months. They don't end up in an autonomous situation necessarily in 12 months' time. There need to be longer funding horizons to allow the supports to stay in place and decline over time, not stay at a high level. However, over time, withdraw those supports to the extent that the person can live in autonomy, and don't withdraw them for those who won't survive without them.

Of course, there is not one response to homeless veterans. There are a number of them, as many as there are homeless veterans. There needs to be consideration given to extending funding horizons and funding support to veterans.

The final recommendation is obviously around prevention, around stopping veterans from becoming homeless in the first place. What we find, as I mentioned, is that most of them didn't have a combat background. What they had was a real hell of a time moving from military life to civilian life. I think we could better prepare our veterans for that experience. In moving from military life to civilian life, there's a cultural and a social shift that is really significant. At least for the people who are coming to our doors, it doesn't appear that they felt they were well prepared to do that.

Some vets are struggling and at risk of homelessness. Thinking of supports before they end up at our doors might be cost-effective as well—things like temporary rent subsidies to keep people housed and that kind of thing. There are ways to prevent homelessness in vets, especially since I mentioned that for most of them it's a 10-year trajectory of degrading circumstances that leads them to the street.

We can see it coming, in a way. If you can keep an eye on these people, you can see that they're on a trajectory toward the doors of the Old Brewery Mission. We should find a way to head that off at the pass. I think with some good thinking on your parts—and count on me to contribute—we can get there.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Thank you.

Mr. Kitchen, you have six minutes.

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Pearce, thank you for joining us, and Constable and Inspector as well.

Mr. Pearce, I realize you're going to stay a little longer, so I may ask you one quick question and then concentrate with the people on the video conference, if you don't mind.

Quickly, you made a statement that there are a number of false declarations by people saying they are vets. Do you have any idea why that would be?

[Matthew Pearce]

There are a couple of reasons that we have been able to draw out. One of them is that obviously we're dealing in, as I mentioned, the largest resource in Quebec for homeless, so there are large volumes of people who hear about a housing program that's for vets. Some of them might say that they might be a vet in order to get into that program. There might be an angle there. I think that's probably one of the main reasons. There might be other reasons, but it has something to do with that.

It's such a detailed story. A lot of them had a brother who was in the military—the big brother that they looked up to—and they admired that story. There are a lot of stories that get created in the context of a shelter. It's a challenge for us to sort of peel away what's true and what has become true over time but isn't, and that kind of thing.

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you very much.

Constable Smith, you're listed as the homeless outreach coordinator. I hear that coordination is as a team of one.

I'm interested in how many hours you put in per day. I'm putting your inspector on the spot here.

[Cst Alyson Smith]

Officially, I work a 10-hour day.

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Is that seven days a week?

[Cst Alyson Smith]

I'm only four days a week.

[Insp Colleen Yee]

Aly is being very modest. She works a 10-hour day four days a week. However, she answers her phone endlessly. People are consulting with her after hours. She never denies any information or requests coming in. She's on the clock all the time.

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

One assumes there's some budgeted funding for this. Do you keep that? Do you track where that funding goes? Is most of that just for hours, or is there funding given to assist you in your job?

[Cst Alyson Smith]

No funding's specifically given to me. My position falls under a larger umbrella, which Inspector Yee oversees. Certainly there's funding that goes towards that, but not a lot. For my position, it's just my role within the police department. I fill a box under the “homeless outreach” position, but there's no specific funding.

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

As you indicated, you work with other organizations. I see that one initiative the Vancouver Police Department does is “Sox in the City”, which donates socks to homeless people.

I come from Saskatchewan. I'm a chiropractor. The chiropractic profession in Saskatchewan has an annual drive called “Toasty Toes”. Chiropractors get their patients to bring in socks for homeless people and to assist throughout the year. In Saskatchewan we get pretty cold at times, so it's obviously helpful for those in need.

Do you take time to try to make connections with an organization that would look at something like that to assist you?

[Cst Alyson Smith]

Often these organizations come to us. In two weeks' time we have a big sleeping bag drive. There's an organization centred in the Downtown Eastside that's able to obtain hundreds of sleeping bags. We, as a department, happen to be lucky enough to receive a large chunk of those. I personally will distribute them to the different facilities we have. I let all the other officers who are out on the road know we have sleeping bags. Our homeless population knows we have sleeping bags and that they usually come around December.

It's a great connection we have with our homeless population. It's a great way for our officers to also connect with those people and be able to provide them with something—some warmth, a toque and a pair of socks and things like that. It goes a long way.

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you.

Inspector Yee, I heard you say that one issue that may pertain to some homeless people is that they're oftentimes victims of crime. We've heard as well that with veterans, there's an issue of shame and pride as to why they approach....

Do you see from your experience a lot of veterans who may have been victims of crime and who have that piled upon the shame they might have?