We are really excited that we will be engaging with veterans and veterans groups in the community across all of Canada in the coming months. We are looking at women veterans and equity-deserving groups.
We are interested in understanding lived experiences. These are things like how women veterans experience issues around identity. Is that different from how men might experience it? We are also looking at what supports they feel serve them the best, not just from Veterans Affairs Canada but in their communities. What does that look like?
We aim to also identify not just the deficits but the strengths, because we really believe we can leverage various partnerships that VAC has with other federal departments. VAC does not have a full mandate for all of the well-being of veterans—health care, for example—but we can work with our partners. We can only do that by speaking directly to veterans and communities and by sincerely listening to what their experiences are so we can move forward with identifying where gaps exist.