We hear from military families all the time that they identify as a military family. What they don't identify with is a military family in transition to civilian life or a “veteran family”. Once you're military, you're military for life.
Little things that we've heard affect families deeply are simple things, such as the veteran's licence plate that you can put on your car, with the veteran's poppy on it. When the veteran dies or becomes divorced, the family has to give up the licence plate. Little things make a big difference.
We don't have identifiers in most data collection intake forms. We don't have them at the distress centre, we don't have them at doctors' offices, we don't have them in schools. They have them in other jurisdictions around the globe and they find it very useful—not to pry or to get into people's lives, but to help them feel welcomed and respected and included, and then to make sure that they get information and access to support, should they ever need these things.
We have much that we can draw on from other countries. We're involved in an international consortium that's looking at translating research, because so much of this is biology, so much of it is experiential, and we share this with the U.K., Australia, and the U.S., and with our other allies. We don't have to start from scratch; there are services out there that, with very little resource, could be tweaked and Canadianized and made readily available.