—and I say that after 10 years in the Senate—of injured veterans who are no more in the service, and their families.
I would consider that family support centre is one of those pivotal bridges they can cross, and survive, into a new world. The family support resource centres have a lot of the expertise and have access both provincially and locally, let alone within the military and within VAC, to influence the battle and get people more timely support.
However, they're hurting because the money is not going there and they can't hire and veterans can't then get that special support. The horrible scenario that I think is still unresolved is that we are improving the individual members, the forces members who are still serving, and we're improving the case of the veterans who are out there with our different clinics and so on, but we're not improving the case of the families.
You have one half of the problem solved; the other half is not, and that half is hurting. It's going to drag down everything you're doing. Until you look at the family as also deploying.... I would argue that the days are now here when the family is part of the operational effectiveness of the forces, and not just in support of the operational effectiveness of the forces. They're on Skype with them an hour before they go on patrol. Come on, how is it possible to disconnect them?
If the family is intrinsic to the operational effectiveness of the forces, they should have access to the same level of care. That means, yes, more money into VAC and more money into DND to take care of the families. We're already transferring a whack of money to the provinces. We're telling the provinces that we're going to clean up our own mess. We created these injured people and we're going to take care of them. We'll buy the resources from you instead of simply dumping them and having that very serious disconnect.