Thank you.
I'm also one of the plaintiffs in the Equitas lawsuit and have been at it for six years.
I've done something different from other advocates. I've tried to do as much outreach as possible to every single advocate in Canada. Anyone who has ever done a story, I reach out to, and that's afforded me a position where the media now approaches me when they want to do a story or when the ombudsman's office wants to do something. The researchers from VAC reach out to me. I've become the central network hub for advocacy in Canada today.
Leading up to the last election, I worked with Harjit Sajjan and Andrew Leslie to have included in the mandate a promise for an in-patient facility, a physical place for veterans to be treated. This hits home for me. It's the most important point I can make for this study you're doing on barriers to transition.
With the experiences of the two witnesses who just spoken, it's so vital to be able to give an individual a plan upfront the second they start to show signs of PTSD, or even the opportunity to start getting help in a plan before they have to say, “I have PTSD”, and step out. It's something that can help them manage through it and learn how to function with it.
Personally I've had groups that we started in B.C., and they're still ongoing and are actually spreading to other places in B.C. Some of the people who are still serving in the RCMP, federal corrections, and former service members are still working but have all the symptoms and stuff that I have. I am able to teach them all of the tools that I have for being able to function, despite my severe PTSD, a traumatic brain injury, and all the symptoms of mefloquine toxicity poisoning—the big three. Most people who have all three end up killing themselves. But if you work really hard, you figure it out. It's like doing a scavenger hunt, trying to figure it out right now, how to become functional, because there is no plan out there.
The people who run the mental health system in this country, these doctors, they all write books. But these books are really like stereotypical instructions and are not tailored to help the people they're supposed to help. On the programming that we do get sent into, the smaller ones like the veterans transition program and COPE, is fantastic except you have to wait up to a year or two years to get into them, which is bad. They don't come close to fulfilling the need, but they are great programs. They're also designed for only 10 days because they were established at a time when there were budgetary constraints so they had to be designed in a small way, at the discretion and the time of the doctors who could take part to facilitate them.
Being a part of this lawsuit, I also got to the point in 2013 of having a bit of a breakdown, and I had to go away for a while. When you have to go away for a while and get away from your wife before you ruin everything, you get sent to addiction centres, the Parkwoods. These are the gold standard, go-to places where you end up going. RCMP members go there as well, with gang members, drug dealers, addicts, hookers, CEO-type people, high-functioning people who abuse themselves and their families.
I was in there with the co-founder of the Red Scorpion gang. I'm sitting there with Ron Francis, an RCMP member who ended up leaving there after three or four days because he couldn't handle it. He ended up killing himself six months later. You might remember that he was the fellow who got in trouble for smoking pot in the red serge in 2013.
This fellow from the Red Scorpions was bragging about not being caught in the big Surrey Six murder many years back because he was already in jail on a gun charge.
Am I drifting? Okay.
Anyway, the “reboot program” that I got established with Harjit Sajjan and Andrew Leslie created a framework for troops to get into upfront so they could get out of the unit, get away from their family because they were masking all of their symptoms, and to get a plan and a program, going forward, so that from then on, no matter which doctor they saw, they would have a plan in hand.
You won the election and I pushed right away as part of our advance meetings with the senior ADMs. I pushed for the six advisory groups, specifically, in my own interest, for a mental health advisory group to help put together the framework for this program. Unfortunately, they wouldn't accept any of the doctors I pushed for, but the existing mental health system here in Ottawa brought in their people. The people associated with the Parkwoods program, the addiction centres, took real offence to our challenging that there needed to be a program like this.
Right now as it stands, we see money going toward research.
Am I running out of time?