Let me first say that the Veterans Affairs staff across the country are doing miracles with the system that is designed, which is very complex but really doesn't get to the heart of the matter. Do I think the government's programs are effective? I think from a percentage standpoint, the percentage is very low that it is effective, because we're starting to.... Now with COVID being thrown in the mix, the homelessness of veterans is increasing dramatically.
What's very hard to do is to find female homeless veterans, because they face a number of battles. We talked just briefly about the sexual assault traumas that a lot of female veterans went through, but to go out there and expose yourself once again to a system that was supposed to protect you.... We're ending up with women living in cars and homeless shelters. When we ask them, “Are you a veteran?”, a lot of them don't want to tell us because our veterans are supposed to be our heroes who don't have weaknesses, who can leap tall buildings in a single bound and all the things that go with it.
The reality is that these are people who we need.... When we go out looking for veterans on the streets out here in western Canada, they're not easy to find like your typical—and it's a sad thing to say—homeless person because we train them to not be seen. Unless you have a military background, unless you have the ability to see where someone is going to conceal themselves.... We've had veterans freezing to death in the winter because they concealed themselves and nobody knew they were there.
If we were doing a good job, that would mean the suicide statistics would be getting down to a point where we could trumpet it across the nation. That is not happening, and there are lots of ways we can fix it, but the ways we're doing it, are, once again, designed so that the bureaucracy succeeds but not so much the end-users.