Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate this.
I want to thank all the people who testified today, and I especially those of you who've served for your tremendous service to us and your personal sacrifice. That is something very specific to those of you who have served. You have served, and you have personally sacrificed to bring forward these realities so that we can do a better job. Thank you for that and your advocacy, your dedication and your work.
If I may, I'll start with you, Sergeant Usherwood. It's a little bit weird to call you that, Nina, but that's how it works.
I want to thank you first of all for sharing your story. That was incredibly personal, and it's important that those words are on the record.
One thing that really had an impact on me in listening to that story is this idea of hiding and then consistently having to explain yourself. That's something that I hope everybody takes away from this. When we have groups in our communities who have to hide who they are, and then once we open those doors, they have to continuously explain, something is falling apart that should not be falling apart and we need to rectify that.
I also want to thank you so much for giving us all a copy of this form. That really tells us something important, which is that when you are in Defence, in the CAF, we are not identifying this particular group, so now we know that we don't have the data and the information from the LGBTQ2+. That means that when we see people transfer to Veterans Affairs, that record-keeping continues not to be meaningful.
I'm wondering if you could help us with some sort of recommendation about what VAC can do to ensure that services are delivered correctly to the stakeholder group, to the LGBTQ2+ community, if VAC doesn't even know who they are.