Thank you very much, Mr. Brassard.
To that end, I submitted a 40-page report with 53 very substantive recommendations. Why? We've been looking at this problem.... For me as an advocate, not much has changed in 20 years in the way the department deals with veterans with psychological injuries. Yes, they've advanced vocational rehabilitation. Yes, they've helped veterans with minor injuries and minor disabilities, but they still cannot bend their heads around the lifelong commitment of care that is necessary for veterans with psychological disabilities who inherently have complex needs.
A perfect example of that is what's called the POC 12 mental health care policy. It says all veterans with complex needs, with mental health problems, will receive case management. Only a quarter of veterans with mental health disabilities are actually receiving case management.
It goes beyond that. Veterans Affairs starts with a paradigm. The veteran comes to them and the veteran's asking, “How can we as a family deal with this?” Veterans Affairs' answer to that is “How can we as a department deal with this?” That is a fundamental paradigm distance that is miles wide that Veterans Affairs doesn't know how to meet. We have to start from the top down and the bottom up, and we have to have a fundamental rethink about how this department works.
Right now the department is structured so that the organizational tools of the department are co-opted by selfish career progressions of the most senior managers. They may be well meaning, but they are 20 degrees removed from the actual reality of what veterans and their families live. We really need to completely rethink this department.
First of all, it has to be taken out of Charlottetown. It's the only federal department that exists outside of Ottawa. It is far from oversight agencies, far from the culture of veterans and their families, and it's been allowed to have a 40-year culture of basically disconnecting itself from not just veterans and their families but Canadians in general. This department is hypersensitive to criticism.
We have to start. I would suggest some number one things that can be done. We have to have an oversight agency that can check in on the department, an ombudsman who is legislated, who has the power to decide their own agenda of investigation.
On top of that, we have to have appointment bodies of advisory groups that are completely independent, not stacked with Veterans Affairs bureaucrats. The board of directors could report to committee, to Parliament, and that board of directors would be a wide swath of Canadians who would independently review the actions of senior leadership.
At the level of working with veterans, we need a collaborative care management program that has independent practitioners, so that every veteran who has a mental health injury is assigned an independent, contracted primary care doctor. The team would consist of a doctor, independent case manager and an occupational therapist.
Veterans Affairs would exist to merely implement all the care and treatment that is recommended by this team. Veterans Affairs would not exist to scrutinize these requests, but would exist to train the senior bureaucrats to learn what veterans need.
To that end, senior bureaucrats should be manning the front lines at least one week a year. They did this with Service Canada back in 2000, and it worked amazingly. Unfortunately the rest of the bureaucracy didn't like the idea of directly serving Canadians as senior bureaucrats at the front line, but we can reinstate that with Veterans Affairs.