Good morning.
It's a real pleasure to participate in this deliberation with this committee. It's a real honour. I'm hoping that I can make a valid contribution.
I think there's a lot for the committee to pull apart, and I do confess that I may not be the best in terms of being up on the issue. I've read everything available in the media and have followed the story quite closely. I do think, though, as we move forward, that I can share some value from my own experiences with Veterans Affairs and the frontline staff who take our calls and deal with our challenges.
I'll be very keen to listen to my colleagues and to the deliberations this morning. What I think may have happened.... In my own experiences, the staff at Veterans Affairs are always super supportive young people and always willing to go that extra mile. I can easily imagine, looking inside the circumference of this particular issue, a well-intended comment going astray, and that's not to situate the estimate or the discussion, but rather to point to one area that I think really could use attention in our Department of Veterans Affairs, and that is a bit of a focus on cultural awareness and training of our own staff at this government ministry.
Any time that a soldier deploys in the Canadian Armed Forces into any country—whether it's sea, land or air—there is always pre-deployment training and always a segment of cultural awareness that talks a bit about the country into which you're going. I wonder sometimes.... I'm not pointing fingers, but I wonder about the ability of what I gather is a stretched government organization to conduct its own internal cultural training and awareness training.
Veterans are a very unique lot in terms of their makeup. We are all very different. We come from different walks of life and different ethnic backgrounds. One common thread, though, through all the brothers and sisters who make up the Canadian Armed Forces and stand as veterans, is a commitment to service, that element of self-sacrifice, and the ability or the desire or the ethos to carry on, no matter how arduous your conditions or how arduous the mission set in front of you. It sounds trite. These words sound so simple to present to the committee, but at the same time, these are values of which we are deeply possessed and which are very fundamental to our being, and they're not as common in our highly polarized society today.
I did want to address in my opening comments this aspect of training, education and cultural awareness for our Veterans Affairs staff. I've always found them wonderfully supportive. It's so easy to say the wrong thing with mental health struggles—wounds to the mind—which are very real. You have ups and downs and you are never completely free and clear. You need daily maintenance on your mental health injury, and it would be easy for even a well-qualified clinician to say the wrong thing. I'm wondering, as we begin this dialogue and continue the conversation, about that fundamental element of internal training.
Perhaps I should leave it there and turn the floor back to the chair.
Thank you.