Thank you very much, Mr. Brassard. I'm very humbled by your comments.
The ombudsman was absolutely correct in using the expression "in their own right". That is the availability part of the program. We all know that there are a lot of programs... [Technical difficulty—Editor] said something about accessibility. That would be of their own accord, because accessibility too often is determined by Veterans Affairs and not by the needs of the family member or the needs of the veterans themselves.
I wanted to use the words "of their own accord", which means that if there is a wish and there is a medical need identified by a practitioner outside of Veterans Affairs, then that care should be given—no questions asked and no delays given.
The obstacles to families searching for mental health care.... All of us have identified the need for it here today, so I won't belabour that point, but many technicalities exist today.
First of all, as Dr. MacKinnon pointed out, in order to get the mental health care for the family, the veteran first has to be case-managed.
Once the veteran has put in a waiting period—and for some of those waiting periods, we're talking about months and sometimes more than a year in some districts for a veteran to receive a case manager—then the veteran is admitted to the medical rehabilitation plan, or perhaps it might be a vocational rehabilitation plan. Once they're admitted to a plan, then they have to go on to develop a case management plan with the case manager. Then the case manager has to identify whether that family needs those plans.
The important thing here is that it's not whether the family has a need; as Veterans Affairs says, it's whether the veteran has a need for the family to get the care. When obstacles are presented, such as those that numerous people pointed out—when the veteran doesn't want the family to get care or doesn't even want a case manager—the veteran's family is left in the lurch.
Veterans Affairs has wonderful rhetoric about how families of veterans should be receiving care. Garnier resulted in both good and bad policy interpretations. One of the good ones that doesn't seem to be acted upon is:
Achieving a positive outcome can be compromised if the client is treated in isolation without addressing the effects that the mental health condition has on the family or the effects that the family dynamic have on the patient’s mental health condition.