Veterans Affairs Committee on June 7th, 2017

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Would you just explain your primary responsibilities?

[Craig Orme]

Effectively, we have our legislation, which covers the legal entitlements enshrined in law for determining veterans benefits. It's beneficial legislation, which means we try to interpret the considerations in the veterans' favour. The legislation outlines the range of benefits that veterans are entitled to and are enshrined in law.

The role of the commission is to then oversee the department's implementation of the legislation, and, if you like, to also adjudicate around issues of policy interpretation. Where the law needs interpretation, and needs to have policy effect and a response to contemporary issues as they arise short of legislation, the commission acts as the authority to interpret those changes. Through the departments, through the delegates of the commissions who make the decisions on individual claims, there's a range of things that come up that don't require changes in legislation but do require interpretations.

Where the interpretation goes beyond simple interpretation of policy and requires changes in legislation, we go back to government, and the government then changes the legislation.

The commission effectively sits between the law and the implementation of the policy on a day-by-day basis.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

I gather you had extensive military experience. Is that correct?

[Craig Orme]

Yes, sir. I spent 37 years in the Australian army. I'm a tank officer, and I'm very proud of that. But more importantly for this role, I spent significant periods of time as the director of senior officer management, as director general of personnel for the army, and as head of defence people capability, which is the senior military personnel officer across the Australian Defence Force. That gave me a good sense of these issues.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Your young soldiers, like our young soldiers, may encounter the current ISIS situation. Whatever the case, years from now, they'll be veterans. From your experience, I am wondering whether the training and preparation for combat of young soldiers is being modified in anticipation of the kind of things they may experience in these kinds of theatres.

[Craig Orme]

I'm speaking on behalf of the Department of Defence, which is outside my lane, but certainly the issue of resilience is something that we've been working on for quite a deal of time. Dr. Hodson is also ex-military, a psychologist, and can probably speak to some of the issues. We are building this into our programs and drawing on some of the experience of the U.S. with resilience training.

We find resilience to be necessary regardless of threats, theatre, or operations. The trauma of military service can exist even in our humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, particularly in the experiences we had in Banda Aceh. It can be present in border protection and in the whole sweep we expect our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and airwomen to operate in. All these missions can be intensely stressful for a range of reasons, not the least of which is ISIS and the uncertainty of that threat.

Mental and physical resilience are key issues. Our defence force is working very hard in that space—both in our recruitment and initial training and also in our predeployment training and in the continuum of service—to provide people with the skills they need to cope with these issues.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

You mentioned Banda Aceh. Was that was the tsunami relief program?

[Craig Orme]

Yes, our soldiers, sailors, airmen, airwomen, and civilians were exposed to significant trauma in that environment. I raise this as an example of trauma outside the traditional operational environment. We focus on stress. In our case, our Viet Nam veterans have experienced significant mental health issues, such as PTSD, much later on. You mentioned ISIS as a new threat, but there is a range of threats that our veterans have covered for generations. The mental health issue, I think, has been undercooked and now we're starting to understand its importance and the effect it has, not only on the veteran but also on their families, immediate and extended. We're trying to come to understand those things in a much better way. It's very much in concert with our allies and our coalition partners that we've fought with over many years.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

How serious is malaria in terms of your having to offer preventative drugs? For a soldier in the field, how serious is malaria?

[Craig Orme]

When we deploy our soldiers across a range of environments—and I actually served with Canadians across a range of environments—it's more the environmental threat, actual and potential, in Asia, the Middle East, and a range of places where malaria is prevalent. We use a range of drugs to prevent malaria. Depending on the theatre of operations, particularly in the Asian region, malaria can be of concern, so we take the preventative approach of putting people on a course of drugs. We administer inoculations for a range of issues, and we make particular drugs available for specific theatres of operation.

[Bob Bratina, Liberal, Hamilton East—Stoney Creek, ON]

Thanks for your comments.

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Mr. Badawey.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

With respect to the different demographics, are you experiencing difficulties in reaching younger generations of veterans, particularly those who may have mental health or PTSD issues? That's my first question.

Second, how does the DVA reach out to veterans and their families with mental health concerns?

[Liz Cosson]

I'll lead in responding to that question.

Certainly, as I mentioned earlier, we only know one in five of our younger veterans, those who have served from 1999 onwards. Yes, we only know one in five.

So we rely on our ex-service organization community, veterans' service organizations which are non-government organizations, to connect with those younger veterans to bring them into the mainstream, to help ensure that they're receiving the support and services that they're eligible for through the Department of Veterans' Affairs.

We have, I think, about 3,000 ex-service organizations, with a lot of them registered as charities. Sometimes they are not as helpful as they could be, but where they are helpful and work with the department, we try to reach those veterans. Certainly we did, as I mentioned, from 12 months ago...we refer to it as “closing the door”. So we now know everyone who enlists in the Australian Defence Force, and through the transformation work that Kate Pope is leading, we're identifying ways we can reach out so that we can connect with those who aren't aware of the support and services we have available.

One other thing that we have done is work with our Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation and data analysts to do some geospatial mapping to work out where those younger veterans are, when they've transitioned from the ADF, where have they gone to live, so that we can see what is available to them in those remote communities, in a lot of instances, across Australia. A range of efforts are under way to try to connect with them.

[Veronica Hancock]

We also have made a substantial investment over the last five years or so in online resources, primarily directed at our younger veteran cohort. We have a website, which is the main go-to place for information about mental health support and services. It's accessible from the Department of Veterans' Affairs website, but it's very specifically about mental and social health support and resources. We've produced a number of mobile phone apps, some quite specifically directed at people who have symptoms. There's one called PTSD Coach, which is our most downloaded app, but we also have another one that is targeted at helping people moderate the amount of alcohol they drink to healthy levels. We have a whole series of web-based and phone app resources to support people who may be experiencing suicidal ideation, and to help build resilience.

[Liz Cosson]

Perhaps I can add one final thing to that. In the budget this year we received funding to extend treatment services to anybody who has served in the Australian Defence Force for one day, for all mental health conditions, so that they don't need to put in a claim. They can just seek the support they need without having to demonstrate it was service-related. So any mental health condition now will receive treatment.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

That's a perfect segue to my third question with respect to those living in Australia who may have actually been with allied or foreign armed forces. Are they offered the same services?

[Lisa Foreman]

You have to have been a member of the Australian Defence Force to qualify. We call that non-liability health care. You need to have been a member of the Australian Defence Force under the legislation to qualify for that.

[Carolyn Spiers]

We do have an arrangement whereby we act as an agent for Commonwealth and allied countries, for service people from those countries who reside in Australia, to administer the compensation systems of those countries for their benefits. So there is that arrangement, but the services we provide are predominantly to Australian-based service personnel, or ex-service personnel.

[Vance Badawey, Liberal, Niagara Centre, ON]

Great. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

[The Chair, Liberal, Neil Ellis]

Mr. Kitchen.

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for getting up early to talk with us. I really appreciate it. Thank you also for the DVA fact sheet that gives us a little bit of information about what you provide for your veterans, and thank you for your service.

I'm just going to go quickly back to the mefloquine issue. We've heard a lot of things on the issue, one of them being about your Returned and Services League. They've looked at sponsoring a neuroimaging study, looking for the correct diagnosis of mefloquine. We had a presentation here by a Dr. Merali, who is also sponsoring a neuroimaging study. I'm just throwing that out there for you to look at that name should you investigate that further. We would appreciate that consideration.

Mr. Orme, it's good to hear that you're a tank man. I grew up with tanks. My father was a major-general and he was the CO of our number one tank regiment, the Royal Canadian Dragoons, so I appreciate hearing that. That said, much of what we've heard through our studies and talking about mental illness is that a lot of times our soldiers are seeing a lack of recognition.

One of the things that tend to be beneficial to them is to be able to talk to somebody and have that person actually understand the language. Having grown up that way—not to say that I understand it completely—I understand it better than most civilians. Can you relate to us how your services integrate that in providing service for your veterans?

[Craig Orme]

Mr. Kitchen, it's a great question; it's wonderful. I'd like to catch up with your father. Of course, the Royal Canadian Dragoons are a remarkable regiment and well known around the world.

In terms of ranking veterans, I think the fact that we have a Department of Veterans' Affairs is probably the key aspect. We have a remarkable universal health system in Australia called Medicare. We have a wonderful country that looks after all of our citizens and delivers services to them, health and welfare, and a range of departments that do that. But we have a separate, single-standing Department of Veterans' Affairs, and its role is to acknowledge that special place our veterans have in our society, those men and women who put their lives on the line on behalf of the rest of our community. Notwithstanding the great work that first responders do—our police, our emergency services—these are the men and women who go to fight our country's wars, or do things that are dangerous and hazardous that no one else can do.

So we have a Department of Veterans' Affairs, which, when initially established, delivered services through through repatriation hospitals and through in-house, if you like, models of service delivery to our veterans. But we've moved now to a model where most of our service is delivered by other agencies—the state and public health systems, private doctors, specialists, all those sorts of things. We work with other departments to deliver some of our income-support payments in an increasingly shared service model.

That said, fact that we have a standing department for veterans' issues is the recognition you speak about. We work very hard to determine and establish the role of the department, and what it may be in the future, to ensure that veterans have a voice, that their specific concerns are recognized, and that on behalf of our nation, we respect their service and deliver services to them.

[Liz Cosson]

I would add, Mr. Kitchen, that we have a couple of programs as well to help staff who perhaps haven't had direct military experience to understand what military experience is like.

One is the It's Why We're Here program that we run within the department. We also have an arrangement with Defence. We have defence familiarization visits where we send our staff out to military bases to understand how military operations occur. Finally, we are working very closely with our special forces community to do a proof of concept on how we can better connect with our special forces members so that they understand us, and we understand them better. We're doing a lot of activities so that we can relate better with our veteran community.

[Robert Gordon Kitchen, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you.

I noticed in your document that you have various cards, levels of carding, for your veterans for health care. Are they based on the number of years of service? I did hear that if someone served one day, they'd have recognition of it. From a pension point of view, are there certain levels in terms of where their pensions may go? Does it lead up to a lifetime pension? Is it a set amount?

Could you explain that a little bit more for us?