They are far better than they were after World War II. I'll tell you that. At least there is some condition of recognition, and there are programs—or attempted programs, at least—to try to serve them.
But it's the psychological effects that people are not aware of. When we were walking at Juno Beach, going to a graveyard, two veterans, one first nation and one Métis, stopped and burst out crying, and we didn't know why. We were all in shock. We stopped and were looking, thinking, “What's going on?” What came to their minds when they were both together walking was when they had come across two children, half-naked, dirty, cold, and wet—it was raining—and they did not and were not allowed to stop because they had to go to the front of the lines. They could not stop to save those children. They cried so loud there—everybody stopped and formed a circle—and they said they had kind of been judge and jury and had played God. They left these kids to die, and they know in their hearts these kids died. That's what they felt. They've suffered through that mindset all their lives, and they drank. Both of them became alcoholics. At the end of the day, they stopped that—they went into evangelism or first nations spirituality—but for most of their lives they were alcoholics after World War II. You start thinking about that.
That is the missing piece of what happened to many of our veterans when they returned. People don't realize that. They're probably in the most dangerous positions in life, and they sometimes have to take people's lives or judge an action that costs someone else's life. They can't get that out of their heads. They can't get that out of their minds, and if they don't have the programs and services to deal with that, then we leave them to fend for themselves. A lot of them will turn to alcohol or some other form to stop that pain in their heads. I can say openly that so many World War II veterans—Métis veterans—faced that when they came home. There are so many in our communities who were alcoholics, and a lot of them were very abusive alcoholics, because there was so much anger inside them following that.
That's why we're so upset with Canada, that it didn't deal with them. It didn't even try to solve it. It didn't even try to apologize to them. There's never been an apology in this country yet to the Métis nation because we did not respect their return. We didn't give them the head start they were promised when they returned. We did not deal with them. We did not sit down and try to help them. We told them to go back to their traplines. In fact, as I said, some of them were even challenged, “You think you served long enough to get any support?” Some of them didn't last a day. Some of them were killed immediately upon being dropped off.
If you look at Mr. Godon, he still suffers from trauma today. At least Canada did help him with the psychological and medical stuff, but it never compensated him. He was a prisoner of war after Juno Beach. As I said, he parachuted too far inside. They tortured him there. He said that in the morning they'd get up and one would get shot. He said, “I think they didn't kill me because I spoke French. They probably thought I was from France, so they didn't kill me, but they'd choose different ones they would take out and shoot.” He had to live with that. He still lives with that today, and, again, nobody's ever said sorry to him.