We don't know how many homeless veterans are out there. Our experience through the work we've done, principally here in Ontario, is these are individuals from close to the Afghanistan era—from Bosnia, Yugoslavia, or Rwanda—who through operational stress injuries have now found themselves on the streets.
They don't identify well as veterans. You can go into a shelter and ask, “Are you a veteran?”, and they won't say yes. What we ask is, “Have you worn the uniform?” A whole bunch of hands will come up, and we start the engagement process from there.
Ontario Command started years ago the Leave the Streets Behind program, which we've made into a national program. The principal centre right now is out of Toronto, but we're here, starting in Ottawa as well. They've helped over 1,000 veterans get off the streets. They have some housing units they now use to put veterans into. We started this program across the country.
Out in B.C., there's Cockrell House. It does a lot of good work with homeless veterans or near-homeless veterans. Those are the people we're trying to reach before they get on the streets and go into that deep dive.
As Ray mentioned, sometimes these people don't want to be helped. Sometimes they want to be unknown. They want to be behind the scenes. They want to be in the shadows. They're not ready to come forward to be helped. We've had veterans tell us they won't identify because they don't want their families to know where they are. It's a big issue out there.
We haven't seen Afghanistan veterans on the streets yet. Most of them are people suffering OSIs from the pre-Afghanistan era, but it's not finished yet.