Yes, sir. Thank you for the question.
Many organizations have a service office. This is the second organization in which I'm working as a service officer. What happens typically is that a veteran who is having a difficult time navigating the system reaches out to a service officer and, hopefully, gets the program started. I'm a volunteer, so I do this in my spare time.
Depending on the caseload and the people coming to me—I expect it's going to escalate given the latest we have heard about our female veterans—I typically get the cases of people who have almost given up. Sean mentioned—and he's been an advocate for a long, long time—that he had to reach out to me. I typically get the cases in which people have almost given up. They have said, “Look, I fought with VAC. I asked VAC questions”—as Tina has alluded to—“and I have spent years and years trying to get answers.”
I can tell you from my own personal experience that VAC does a good job of answering many phone calls and many questions in two minutes, but more often than not, the answer is “no” or “start again”. Once again, the service officer's role is to try to keep that veteran on this side of the cliff, if you will, and to make sure that they don't do something to cause self-harm.
You have to remember that the next step for a veteran who's being told “no, no, no” could be substance abuse and all the things that go with that. In my opening statement, I alluded to suicide. When a person takes their life, that's the ultimate failure of a nation and of the organization built for them. Again, I can't stress enough that I absolutely have to thank the countless people across VAC who have helped me to keep these people alive, to keep these people going for one more day, one more phone call. As Tina said, some people just don't have that.
When a 47-year-old man takes his life and leaves seven kids behind, we have a system that needs some things that have not been tried before. We've been talking about this. Sean's been a service officer for decades. I have more than a decade. We're talking about the same things now that we were talking about in my first trip to Ottawa. A service officer is the one who is trying to hold on to that individual, male or female, to say, “Let's try one more thing. Let's try one more day.”