Frankly, those were my benefits. In that case, to be fair to VAC, it was the DND side, but I hear similar stories from people who are applying to Veterans Affairs as well.
Actually, Alannah had some hearing damage from a mine strike. She applied and was denied immediately, and then she had to appeal. That did its thing, so she got a settlement. Then somebody lost her file, and her case manager was reassigned and she didn't know, so there was this 14-month delay where she was constantly calling the office and not getting anywhere.
She had stressed out enough when I was being messed around with by our case manager in the military. That one was a shock to us, because these are people in uniform who we thought were there to support us. I'm not saying they didn't support us. They did, but not in the spirit in which we would have expected them to treat injured, wounded soldiers.
She is much smarter than I am, so she was able to find her way through the system and deal with the right people. She's also Irish, so when she really gets on a roll, people tend to stand to. Her biggest thing, and my biggest thing, has always been.... As I said in my opening statement, this is a ministry established to help veterans transition into normal life, but so many veterans feel that it's not even worth calling, as in the case of our friend, for fear of receiving negative news or being denied something they expect should be easy-peasy.
I am considered to have my stuff together and to be relatively successful, but any time I have to deal with Veterans Affairs, I get a little uneasy. I look for better things to do, whatever they might be, because I just don't want to deal with, “Well I thought it was this”, and they say, “Well, no, it's not that. It's this”. There are certain benefits you would think are automatic that just aren't.
I was on a committee under former Minister O'Toole when the last government was in charge, and a lot of it was about cutting the red tape and getting rid of all these forms that have to be repeated, but that's just part of it. It's also about the ease of accessing benefits. Call them entitlements for service or whatever you want to call them, but the spirit of it just doesn't seem to be what a lot of veterans feel it should be.