I'm an ex-sergeant from the Canadian Forces, a Métis. I did 21 years in, five missions, and I can guarantee to Mr. Sheffield that whether I was a Métis or not, especially in Quebec...it's disgraceful, you know. You've got to fight all the time.
So basically I took away that part, the Métis thing, and I just said, well, I'll become an ordinary citizen and try to ask for all my stuff through Veterans Affairs. They did a great job with me. Right now I've got PTSD and everything. Anything that's financial, right now, and even with taking care of myself, it all took a long time. I went bankrupt. I had to go through all that stuff, but that's okay. Everything's good for me, right now, but imagine all the work I've done. I do a lot of work right now on the actual “cows' ground”, like, you know,
“right in the trenches”
in French.
I'm the recipient of both the VAC commendation—the minister's commendation—and the ombudsman's commendation, not long ago, for the work I've been doing on the ground, and especially what Dr. Sheffield was saying. I didn't write anything. It's mostly all ground work, and basically it's the same thing. It hasn't changed. Fifty, sixty years down the line, it hasn't changed.
In Odanak right now, Luc O'Bomsawin, who is our president, is Abenaki. His uncle went to the Korean War, but he's a white man married to an Indian woman and he lives on Odanak reserve, and it's a complete disaster. He's not getting service at all, and when the VAC comes out, they tell him he's living on the Indian reserve so the reserve should take care of him, but he says no, he's a white man. So imagine, we're still having all these little problems. It's the same thing, in between that.
Basically, as Dr. Sheffield was saying, in the northern part, where it's mostly non-educated people—and you hear it on the news all the time—people are mutilating themselves on some of the reserves, there are a lot of homeless, a lot of everything, so basically this is where we've got to work it out. We need to have direct communication with these reserves. Me, being a Métis, they don't want me in there. They're saying, “No, you're just a Métis. You're like a white man but with red blood.” Basically, that's what they tell me. “You're a white man with red blood.”
If my grandfather had been aboriginal, then I would have been aboriginal, but that's the main thing.