Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am François Joyet, president of the Quebec chapter for Canada Company, and a board member.
As fast as I can I'll say that over the last two years our organization has been sponsoring a respect campaign spearheaded by Steve Gregory and Doug Bellevue, which has brought us to meeting a lot of different people, different organizations, throughout Quebec, Ontario, and the west, to come to a very basic conclusion.
Being from a business mindset and not a medical mindset, in business, we often say that we are as strong as the weakest link of our chain. We've noticed that there are many people doing many different things and millions of dollars being invested to help our veterans find solutions to what I think is generally agreed, that PTSD is a mental illness, and homelessness comes from it, as does suicide.
We started wondering how we could find a way to fix this. We had the pleasure of meeting people from the Saguenay region who were in contact with les Frères Maristes, which has an old school congregation site. We started asking questions of how we as a group could put everyone together and offer one complete service, with the end result being the reinsertion into Canadian society of our veterans becoming productive Canadian citizens again.
I don't think I can go over everything here with you today, but one of our asks was how we can get formal approval to putting these various organizations around the table to come to a complete and formal proposal. We've met the people from l'Hôpital Sainte-Anne. We've met people from the Old Brewery Mission in Montreal. We haven't met with the people from OSI yet, but we have identified them as people we need to be sitting down and talking with.
We do not have an interest in reinventing anything. Everything is out there. You have people doing zootherapy with dogs. You have Wounded Warriors financing programs with equestrian centres in the west. You have True Patriot Love, which is even financing a program at the University of Southern California—I'm searching for my words because I got off my text; I was told to be very short and sweet and to the point—which brings the person into a simulator where they're revisiting what caused the PTSD.
When you go across Canada and you start meeting all these different people, everyone is doing something, but no one is doing it together. No one is doing it under one roof, offering a complete service. How do we bring the person to an end result, which is back into society as a productive citizen? This is something we'd like.
I sent my text, so I think you will have it. There's a lot of work to be done. I do not have a formal proposal to give to you, but I think if we, as an independent voice, business leaders, were able to put all these people around the table to come up with a formal project, we could do something like that.
Rapidly, that's it.