I took a picture of the wait times with my cell phone. The wait times were one hour and 14 minutes, one hour and 40 minutes, or one hour and 15 minutes. It's a constant struggle. First, you need a response. They then transfer you from one department to another. In the end, they give you a name. Otherwise, and this is the most frustrating situation that can occur, they put you on hold and then disappear. You must then start the whole process over again.
And you start the whole process all over again. It is so frustrating. You just give up, which is almost.... I hate to say it, because I know your staff come to work in the morning wanting to do good for people, but that is not the way it comes across, Mr. Chair. It is not the way it comes across. It seems that they just want you to go away, as Tracy so succinctly put it.
The good news is that we keep dying, so we will go away. You just have to wait us out. We keep dying, but in the meantime, it would be nice to have a little, tiny bit of dignity accorded to us by VAC. I'm sorry, but if I get emotional, it's because it is an emotional procedure.
My dear friend Andy Fillmore knows part of the therapy. He tasks us. He calls veterans and says, “I need you to do an income tax run”, or “I need you to do a food bank run” or “I need you to go and visit this guy”. He knows what the answer is going to be when he calls us. The answer is going to be, “I'm on it, Mr. Member”, and we just go. That's our therapy, but we had to do it all within ourselves. I'm sorry, but we had to do it all within ourselves with the faint hope clause that we will get through or that we will find....
Heather MacKinnon should have retired three or four years ago. We need new guardian angels just to know what buttons to push to get through to Veterans Affairs.
I'm sorry; I apologize.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.