Thank you, Chair.
I guess I'll start. Hey, Cody, Jesse, guys. I was 20 years in the infantry. I hear you guys loud and clear. I'm tracking, so get in contact if you can, and let's have a talk.
I don't have a prepared statement or anything. I retired. I was lucky. My transition was, I want to say blessed, I guess. Alannah here is my wife. We support each other. I was lucky enough to get elected to city council here in Ottawa pretty much as I was retiring, and that's been great. It gave me a sense of purpose. It gave me a reason to get out of bed and carry on serving my country.
The thing that I hear the most, and I think our first two witnesses pointed it out, is that there's a big gap in what happens from when VAC can help you and when DND is releasing you. I have to wonder if SISIP is perhaps a barrier to a proper transition. I've heard several times...Cody said it. He had to go to school or he was going to miss out on those benefits. I know that Veterans Affairs has some kind of benefit. I've been told they do. I haven't used that but maybe in his case he might have been advised to wait like he said, take his break, and then Veterans Affairs could have picked up where SISIP had left off. I'm not sure what the answer to that is.
We have a lot of soldiers releasing who are in the same state of mind as Cody, Jesse, and I was. I was in that state of mind until I realized I had a purpose, to run for the election. I don't want to speak for Alannah but she released and is trying to discover who she is going to be after being a soldier for 23 years. There are many great programs and systems in place. The problem everyone seems to be having—DND, SISIP, and Veterans Affairs—is how to deliver them, how to communicate enough.
I went to my SISIP representative, my Veterans Affairs representative and, of course, when we release we have our DND representative who helps us with our release process. I couldn't tell you which benefits I qualified for, at what time. I'm supposed to be one of the guys who has it together, so to speak. I think it's a very complicated process—or maybe it's not. Maybe it's not being communicated in a way that we can understand.
This is not to draw a line between combat arms and anybody else, but I don't know what you guys had. I was at the RCR—guys, don't hold it against me. When you're in the infantry you have a lot done for you. You have an administration clerk. They do your leave pass. You have a medic that looks after you when you're sick. You have a supply clerk who gives you your boots and your ammo.
For me, I had both feet blown off by a land mine, and suddenly when I was releasing I was supposed to do all this paperwork myself. It was extremely frustrating because paperwork to me was my recce sketch and my patrol report that I would hand in after coming back from a mission. I didn't understand the process. I know that it sounds at this point now, 10 years later, a little weird that I couldn't figure out how to do paperwork, but at that time I was more worried about learning how to walk again than how to fill out a form.
I want to leave it there. I'm eager to get to your questions, and I want to allow Alannah a few minutes to testify as well. What I'm seeing is that we have a gap between release and when Veterans Affairs can help. I do believe Veterans Affairs does their best with what they're given but I think maybe we need to make it a lot easier for the troops to access what's available.