Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
[Technical difficulty—Editor] participate at this standing committee. I don't usually work from notes and I speak a lot locally. When I started my service, I was sworn into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on my 19th birthday—on May 29, 1974—and served a total of 31 years. I served initially with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and then accepted a commission into the navy, which was the start of some excellent service and some serious trauma. They both go with the job.
I retired in 2004 after 31 years of service. There are a few people on my computer who are being vastly underscored, mostly by themselves. My treatment was started by Dr. MacKinnon. Dr. MacKinnon and former NDP member Peter Stoffer are probably considered the two patron saints of veterans and their families, and I am not exaggerating.
It seems that a great deal of the care that comes to veterans and their families comes after an incident, and we are hip deep in incidents here in Nova Scotia. What happened in Portapique impacted many mounted policemen, some of whom I trained many years ago. Heidi Stevenson (Burkholder)—that will tell you how far back we go—was a very good friend of mine. The names on the wall keep going, and they shouldn't.
When I retired, I was medically released—mind you, after 31 years—as a result of injuries sustained when I was picking children out of a minefield halfway through a UN deployment to the killing fields of Cambodia in 1992. Even though that happened on August 14, 1992, it never came to light until 2002, and that was only because Dr. MacKinnon saw a few things that she didn't like. She started me down a rabbit hole that is perhaps the reason I'm still alive today.
There are all sorts of facilities in Halifax, and I don't know if it's because I retired as a senior officer or why it would be, but I seem to have better success accessing these facilities and benefits than any other members. If you go to a Facebook page called “UN and NATO veterans group”, you'll see that I am a member. We get together every Saturday morning—about 80 of us—for breakfast, and there are only two officers in the entire group. I am one of them and the other is Commander Fred Maggio, who, like Dr. MacKinnon, was a very instrumental medical officer in the military in Halifax.
I offered to join this group because I wanted to try to address the problem of the difficulties veterans and their families have in being addressed only after there is an incident. I am not very far from Lionel Desmond's home. I'm one hour away from that terrible tragedy. I did not walk in his moccasins so I have no idea what the situation was, but all of a sudden I hear the same rhetoric over and over again: Where did we go wrong? What did we miss? What could we have done?
I will gladly point [Technical difficulty—Editor]. My boss at the time, R. A. Dallaire, said that we should probably talk to somebody about this. But in 1992, for those of you with a poor memory, there was such a great stigma attached to mental health issues that nobody ever went forward. They put a piece of rope up around a beam in the basement instead. There are still people doing that, and I deal with it every day.
My life support system is my beautiful wife. Even though she's the one who many mornings gets me out of bed and gets me to take on the world, there are no benefits whatsoever for her. She is one-fifth of my life support system. My daughter and three grandchildren are the others. They are what keep me going. When things start crossing my mind that I wish wouldn't cross my mind, it is my beautiful wife Jane and my grandchildren who pull me back from the precipice.
We have a veterans memorial park in Bass River, Nova Scotia. Please google it. Once again, another doctor, Dr. Karen Ewing, created a world-class veterans memorial park that is a magnet, a gravitational point for veterans here in Halifax. We muster there for United Nations celebrations. We muster for Remembrance Day. We muster for Holocaust memorial. It's all those little non-VAC support systems that get us through the day.
With my dual background, I started out with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and then retired from the military. There are so many Mounties here in Halifax, so many Royal Canadian Mounted Police members who still, in many circles, are not even considered veterans. They come to me and ask, how do you address this problem, how do you get access to this, how do you get this benefit, or how do you get a disability tax credit from CRA?
I hope I'm wrong, but it seems that the default setting in response to any query or inquiry directed at VAC is “no”. If 50% of the people who apply for a stairclimber, a TENS machine or whatever, are met with a no, 50% of them say, “Well, I applied for it and they denied it, so I guess we're done.” Then you go to the Veterans Review and Appeal Board and you put in an appeal. Maybe that works, or maybe they will come back again and say, “No, that's not related to your pension condition.”
If you have PTSD and when you get an attack you are shut down muscularly and Dr. Leckey loans you a TENS machine and says, “Here, try this”, and you put it on your neck and start zapping yourself and all of a sudden you can move and can get back to attacking the problem that put you there in the first place, she says, “Wow, it seems to work.” She sends the letter saying, “Listen, I did one of these on a trial basis and did it ever work” They come back and say, “Yes, but it's not related to his pension condition.” Then you want to jump into your car or onto your motorcycle ride up to Ottawa and find this individual who keeps saying no to medical professionals who say this might help. They don't say this will help; they say this might help.
The response or the approach is quite often, and I hate this, I have it written down here, that you have to find an angel, a “VAC angel”, we call them. One of them is on my computer here. She knows who she is. They know what buttons to push. You're not supposed to have to know which buttons to push.
I was in charge of the most unpopular organization in the military, the career manager shop. I would sit my staff down every morning and say, “Listen, let's try to help out more people today than we piss off. You're not going to get them all right, but let's just try to help out more than we hurt. That's the best we can hope for.”