Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
On behalf of Wounded Warriors Canada, let me begin by thanking the House committee for its hard work in addressing the important issue of homelessness among Canadian Armed Forces veterans.
I know this committee has probably heard a lot of statistics and a lot of studies and comparisons of numbers and percentages of homelessness among our veterans in the general population. One thing I think we can all agree on is that even one homeless veteran is too many, especially since this is a population that was recruited, trained and screened to protect Canadian interests. Wounded Warriors Canada has a very simple mission: to honour and support Canada's ill and injured Canadian Armed Forces members, veterans, first responders and their families. To that end, we're endeavouring to be the benchmark charity delivering effective evidence-informed mental health programs in support of ill and injured veterans, first responders and their families.
As introduced, I'm privileged to serve as the national program director of Wounded Warriors Canada. Owing to the generosity of Canadians from coast to coast, we will invest over $3.2 million this year in leading-edge programming that's changing and saving lives. My brief comments and observations today are reflective of our 12 years of experience as a charity operating in the veterans space, with the last six years seeing Wounded Warriors Canada focus on mental health, with just a little bit of influence, maybe, coming from my quarter century as a chaplain in the Canadian Armed Forces and some of my observations there.
Successive governments and ministers have spoken about the critical need to institute policies and practices that would see the Department of National Defence and the Department of Veterans Affairs have what they keep calling a seamless transition from uniformed service to civilian life and beyond release. The critical need for this is particularly true in the cases of those who are medically released, as they are the most vulnerable and sometimes fall through cracks in the system. We have observed some progress in this area over the last number of years, and I think we would all agree that still more needs to be done. We don't doubt the earnestness or the strategic understanding of this necessity by strategic ministers; however, we must redouble the efforts to ensure that this objective is indeed implemented at the tactical and bureaucratic levels, where it often seems to get off track a bit.
Particularly, we note that those who are medically released are most often ill-prepared for transition because they planned on having long careers. Therefore, it's incumbent upon leadership to do all they can to ensure an orderly, informed transition to increase the chances of successful transition. Many facing medical release are suddenly met with the unexpected coupled with the sudden existential crisis concerning their meaning, their value and where they are as members of society. This is kind of reflecting what the last speaker said about the best years of your life and having that identity tied to being a member of the Canadian Forces and the pride that comes with that. Many facing medical release are suddenly met with that crisis and they have their identity completely taken away from them because they've tied it so much to being a Canadian Armed Forces member.
Of course, when they receive the news of that, they most often don't want to leave, so there's a delay and denial and then they start to plan for their eventual release from the Canadian Forces. Steps need to be taken to ensure that members and families understand and participate in the full release process and understand timelines, benefits and options. We need to make sure they actually understand the entire process that is going on.
Given that medical releases in particular or voluntary releases that have not been completely thought through may leave the member and his or her family with limited plans and support post-release, early engagement in the process, including assistance with sound financial literacy, would seem to be a wise and prudent provision as people transition into their period of release.
Many of the veterans who experience homelessness also have addiction problems and mental health problems. On the mental health end, we can say our experience as a charity in all these areas is that the earlier the intervention takes place, the more successful it is. Early on in Wounded Warriors Canada's experience, we believed that, since we were at the height of Afghanistan, those seeking the mental health services that Wounded Warriors Canada's programs offered would come from that population.
In the first number of years that we offered our mental health programs, we found that the veterans and their families who came to us were often 10 or 15 years removed from the incident from which their mental health injury occurred. That made that injury so much more entrenched and much more difficult to address, so the earlier the better.
Finally, there are lots and lots of various organizations that are seeking to address this across the country in various ways. There are studies and large groups from coast to coast, like VETS Canada, the Royal Canadian Legion with Leave the Streets Behind, Soldiers Helping Soldiers, and a patchwork of other provincial and non-governmental organizations right across the country.
Our advice to this entire space would be that these groups begin to learn lessons from one another and co-operate in best practices. One of the principles that Wounded Warriors Canada has in all of our programs is that it doesn't matter where the veteran or the first responder or their family lives in Canada; they're going to get the same level of service. We have to try to do that on the homeless front as well. It doesn't matter whether you're in Flin Flon or in Vancouver; you should be accorded the same thing.
It's a challenge, we know from programs we've done. We spent a lot of time working with Help for Heroes and learning some of the lessons that they have learned in the U.K. They have a great benefit to their programs. They have a really small country with a big population, so they can get everybody in one place. We have the opposite problem. We have a small population with a big country. So some of the bricks-and-mortar solutions need to be looked at, and we need to look at other ways of creating partnerships at the strategic and tactical levels that will avoid duplication and allow people to work together with best practices.