Veterans Affairs Committee on March 27th, 2018

[LGen (Ret'd) Stuart Beare]

I can only speak to the Ottawa experience, because we're not in all those other population centres yet. It's completely anecdotal, but my read of this as it relates to those who find themselves homeless is that they need the full inventory of options to get off the street. That includes shelters. That includes housing first programs and strategies that can deliver the recuperative experience that gets you off the street. I'm not competent enough to speak about affordable housing or those issues, but the number of non-profits and charities involved in that is absolutely impressive. Here in Ottawa, the multi-faith housing initiative, which provides for low- to no-income families, including those who are homeless, is embarking on creating a veterans house here in Ottawa as one of the platforms to take someone from a shelter into a facility that doesn't just give them a roof, but a new experience, which can launch them into a life beyond homelessness.

But as for affordable housing, I cannot competently speak to that.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

What about the gaps? You must be seeing gaps that the government might be able to plug. Is there anything you can identify here today?

[LGen (Ret'd) Stuart Beare]

Because we're working with those who provide those services, they have the information. We don't, so I'm really not competent to speak on that.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

Sergeant Gilmore, we talked earlier about people who are coming out, who have served, who aren't ready for a lot of the services that we're talking about. Maybe you could speak to how the government could better support people when they're not ready to move to the next level.

[Alannah Gilmore]

I noticed that one of your questions here was about whether we are too quick to try to make something new out of somebody when they're not ready. Again, it's about recognizing when a person's in crisis and recognizing whether or not they're ready and able to move on to something that's significantly different from what they already know. A lot of times—and I've seen it first-hand, including with myself—you're rushed out the door and you're rushed to jump into something else. Who you were when you served under that umbrella of the military and who you are when you get out is not the same. You are not the same person. For some people that identity crisis becomes a major crisis, and it's just because you were pushed into figuring out what hobby or what sorts of interests you would have on the other side. It's “Quick, quick. Hurry, hurry. You'd better pick a subject”. But, “Oh, no, sorry, not that subject because we won't cover that one.” It's as if all of a sudden you're steered in a new direction that you're not necessarily ready to be steered into, and all they're doing is creating major stress for that individual. That will probably affect how quickly you'll heal, and a whole lot of money will be wasted when people start dropping out of programs.

I think there should be a little less focus on the financial burden that we seem to think certain injured soldiers might become, and maybe put more focus on the best thing we can do for that particular individual. Maybe they will not be able to return to work. Maybe they will do things like I do, such as advocacy work and volunteer works and being able to do all of these other things. I think maybe we should focus on how to make them the best members of society that we can, in whatever capacity they're ready and able to handle.

[Gord Johns, NDP, Courtenay—Alberni, BC]

All right. Thanks for the feedback. I know that in the United States they've made a commitment to hiring former veterans as front-line caseworkers—and 30% is where they're at. We're far off that mark. We don't have clear targets on how we're going to get there. Maybe that's something you'd like to see us focus on.

[Alannah Gilmore]

I would love to see DND and VAC practise what they preach. We talk about priority hiring. You should go from uniform to appropriate civilian attire and do that job. You might not be deployable, but it's your knowledge in that trade and in that position. I'm sorry, but there is no civilian who can walk in without doing basic training and know what it's like to be a soldier. I would still be able to wear my medals, but I'd wear them on a suit jacket. It would just show that I'm still serving. I do not think we practise what we preach. Somehow we've managed to take a soldier's qualifications and dumb them down. We're just not smart enough on the civilian side, yet we're masters of all trades in the military. I wore so many hats. I have such a variety of experience. You don't see that on the other side. If anything, the translator that Monster.ca, or whatever they're called, was supporting a while ago.... It's that idea: take what we can do and translate it so someone understands just how awesome we are.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Eyolfson.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you both for coming.

Lieutenant-General Beare, you talked about the homeless. I'm a recovering ER physician. I did that for 17 years before going into politics. My job was in the inner city of Winnipeg.

Many of our patients were homeless, and that was where most of them got all of their medical care. We were the family doctors for a large number of homeless people. We were not officially their family doctors, but it was the only care they got. We were aware of all the issues that bring about homelessness, with 60% of them being rooted in mental health.

We had a lot of interplay with the agencies. There's the Salvation Army, and one in Winnipeg called the Main Street Project. We said that without those things, we would have had to have triple-level bunk beds in our department.

There was one thing that never came up in my experience, because we hadn't really been trained for it, and there was no infrastructure or knowledge base to direct us this way as physicians. We had had no training to recognize whether any of these people were veterans or involved with the military. Again, because they got all their care there, that would be somewhere in their charts in the hospital.

Has there been any outreach to the medical system for training at the medical school level, and to putting this issue on the radar of emergency departments? All of the homeless eventually end up there. It can often be a good entry point. We use the emergency department to enter people into all sorts of programs, whether it's for substance abuse or psychiatric care. If we could get these people immediately on the radar of Veterans Affairs and all the groups that veterans can help, it might be able to help.

I think of the vast untapped resources. Has there been any consideration or any move to adding the primary medical system into this?

[LGen (Ret'd) Stuart Beare]

What we're witnessing is that identification is a challenge for the homeless, period.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Yes.

[LGen (Ret'd) Stuart Beare]

Identifying someone who is homeless as a veteran is another challenge. Who you are, having an address, and whether you served, are sometimes for some people elusive, and they can't answer them.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

What I'm getting at is that we do know some of them are veterans.

[LGen (Ret'd) Stuart Beare]

Yes.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Should we be providing resources to the department, so that when you do identify a veteran in the emergency department...?

It had never occurred to us that there was something—

[LGen (Ret'd) Stuart Beare]

Going back to the community base—

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Yes.

[LGen (Ret'd) Stuart Beare]

Part of the procedure for admissions at emergency or otherwise is to ask the question, establish the contact, and have a relationship which pre-exists finding a person. Go back to the ecosystem of folks who provide services to the homeless, including health, and include them in the ecosystem, create the pro forma for the questions you ask. It's the same with law enforcement. If someone is arrested, ask them the question. If someone shows up in court, ask them the question.

The point of contact can be a Veterans Affairs case worker. It could also be part of the ecosystem that is focused on veterans who are in crisis. It could be an SHS. It could be a community service.

The bottom line, though, is that if the community doesn't know who to call, then it's “catch and release”, unfortunately.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Exactly.

Again, before I went into politics, I did not the know the issues and that there might be special places that we can help to plug these—

[LGen (Ret'd) Stuart Beare]

Number one, citizen identification is a problem if you don't have an address. The veteran's status and affirmation is a challenge.

One of the services we provide is to find people's service records so we can help them establish their military identity, while at the same time working with the Bank of Montreal to give them an address so they can open a savings account.

These are fundamentally simple civil society issues, but they can be addressed from the bottom up, community-wise. If a policy for identification and acceleration, number one, of my citizen identity and, number two, my veteran status, could be created, that would be fantastic. Accelerating my ability to prove that I served would be amazing.

[Doug Eyolfson, Liberal, Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia—Headingley, MB]

Thank you.

I'm going to share the rest of my time with Mr. Samson.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Phil McColeman]

You have 30 seconds.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Very quickly then, Alannah, let's go to the main question.

What can be done to improve the culture surrounding PTSD and mental health issues for both CAF members and veterans? What can we do to allow these individuals to be more willing to report their issues and PTSD?

[Alannah Gilmore]

I think the first one is to remove the threat of being removed from the military, immediately. That would be number one.

The other one would be having more conversations. We have the mental health first aid course now. That should be taught to the people who are serving. Their family members should be taking this. I know it's starting to get bigger and bigger, and I think it's a really good idea because people need to be able to identify and the member needs to be able to identify. Many times, we practice denial and we just say, “Wow, that was a really irrational way for me to handle that situation. That's not really like me.” When you start having more and more of those situations, where your behaviour is starting to change, that's when you start to recognize that there's something more going on. We don't always identify with it originally. We think it's just a bad day, or it's something we ate, or we didn't get much sleep. I think that increasing the communication can remove that stigma of there being a weakness factor involved.

Ultimately, the more we train and plan for future missions.... Obviously, how you perform might be a little different from how you handle returning back to Canada. After coming back from some of the places we go to, being in a first world country is really hard. You'll find that your lack of patience or lack of empathy for people, on this side of the border, truly makes it very difficult for people transitioning to come back.

I do think there is so much that can be done to try to improve it, but the first one is to remove the threat of removal from the military.

[Darrell Samson, Liberal, Sackville—Preston—Chezzetcook, NS]

Thank you.