Good afternoon.
I am retired Corporal Bruce Moncur.
I served in the Canadian Forces for almost a decade, during which I fought in Afghanistan and took part in the largest battle in the war, which was Operation Medusa. My company, Charles Company, fought ferociously for over two days of fighting until we were deemed combat ineffective. My platoon, the Crazy Eights, would be reduced from 40 to five in those 48 hours. After a friendly fire incident, I would sustain a life-threatening wound that would require the removal of 5% of my brain. I would have to relearn how to read, write, walk and talk.
I sit before you a mere eight weeks from finishing a teaching degree. I also started the Canadian Afghanistan War Veterans Association, and the not-for-profit Valour in the Presence of the Enemy. Each of you would have received about 50 to 100 letters about Jess Larochelle.
I am one of the original 15 veterans on the ministerial advisory board that was created in 2015. I currently co-chair the service excellence committee.
I have been a veterans advocate for over a decade, first for myself, when my lump sum pension was a mere $22,000, and now for others as we try to navigate the insurance company we call Veterans Affairs.
I have endured former Veterans Affairs minister Julian Fantino walking out on me and former Veterans Affairs minister Kent Hehr clapping as the then-CDS Jonathan Vance berated me at a stakeholder summit when I told him that not having a VAC representative present at the 10th anniversary reunion for Operation Medusa was a mistake.
I wanted to make the guys aware of the services available to them and was reduced to asking for a table with magnets and a phone number. That, too, was denied. I felt an inch tall after I has been jacked up. It was not six weeks later that one of the soldiers at the reunion committed suicide. I don't know if we could have helped him or prevented it, but I would like to have tried.
To date I have met, known or tried to help 11 soldiers who have taken their lives. You see, VAC has been offering MAID in many forms for years, but now they have gotten rid of all pretences.
It was later that I had to sit through the former Veterans Affairs minister Seamus O'Regan's speech at the Sam Sharpe breakfast, which is a breakfast in honour of a colleague of yours who committed suicide after his service in World War I. The minister would then tell a room full of veterans that he could relate to our PTSD because of his alcoholism.
It has only become worse since then.
The state of Veterans Affairs is apocalyptic—worse then I have ever seen it. In my opinion, the deliberate actions taken by the minister to put the department in such disrepair was only a means to justify the $571 million Lifemark privatization.
I am interviewed in a book written in 2015, Party of One, by Michael Harris. I joke with him about how they could have thousands of more points of contact if they put VAC material in McDonald's. I could never have imagined that my joke would become a sick reality.
Yet wait times keep getting longer.
They ignored the file so thoroughly that case manager Kevorkian could operate with impunity as an attempted serial killer using legally sanctioned MAID as her murder weapon, all under the minister's nose. He was too focused on the half a billion dollars of taxpayers' money that's going to the Weston family and Loblaws. These are the same people who were fixing the price of bread, are raising the price of groceries so families can't buy meat, and are unable to keep children's Tylenol on the shelves.
This new deal is only going to add a division between the veterans and the government.
We have seen in the past that the new implementation of services has taken years to iron out. Service Canada offices took at least a decade. The new veterans charter never worked; hence, this new deal.
In my opinion we need to look at how much it will cost to get out of this deal. If you are determined to go through with it, then what does the contract say about when Lifemark does not meet its obligations? Will you hold them accountable?
We've had nobody at the table to help us make these decisions. In the meantime, the minister must do the honourable thing and resign. He tweets more about potatoes than about veterans. The Department of Veterans Affairs must be moved back to Ottawa. I care little about the ramifications it will have for the economy of P.E.I. There is more Canadian veteran blood in P.E.I. than Afghanistan, Bosnia and Korea combined.
If the minister resigns, I have no faith in a Prime Minister who has missed over half of our Remembrance Day ceremonies.
You must call a royal commission into Veterans Affairs. Lives depend on it.
Thank you.