How much time do I have?
Evidence of meeting #12 for Veterans Affairs in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was suicide.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Evidence of meeting #12 for Veterans Affairs in the 45th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was suicide.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
Cathay Wagantall Conservative Yorkton—Melville, SK
Both Dave and Darren, you have relationships—and you have opportunities within your service, Dave.
Do you know of any way that we might be able to track suicide amongst veterans? We're always told it can't be done unless they're members of VAC.
Conservative
Conservative
Conservative
Cathay Wagantall Conservative Yorkton—Melville, SK
You were there and then you went looking for a lot of them when you had this realization about mefloquine.
As an Individual
When I started reaching out, I would start noticing clusters because of part of my verification process. For example, one rotation in Afghanistan had the record number of suicides that I've come across, which was 14 in one rifle company.
Conservative
As an Individual
No, that's the record I found through my interactions with people. I've seen companies with eight and 10, but 14 was the record, though.
Conservative
Cathay Wagantall Conservative Yorkton—Melville, SK
Thank you.
Darren, do you have anything to add? It's important that we figure out how to identify when someone passes away from suicide.
As an Individual
When someone passes away from suicide, and they're serving, they know and we know.
As an Individual
For me, as veteran and as a former police officer, every sudden death that takes place outside of a medical facility is investigated by a police officer, at least everywhere I worked. We have boxes to check on a form. We used to call it a preliminary report of death. Why don't we put a box or a chapter there asking if the person was a veteran?
The answer could be yes, no or unknown. Take the effort to find out if they're a veteran, and then we can start tracking this.
Veteran, As an Individual
I have one quick point. A veteran buddy of mine served in the Medak Pocket in 1993 with 2 PPCLI in Croatia. It was a group of three of them from the N Sask R that all went with 2 PPCLI to Croatia that year. Now there's one alive. That's two in three, if you want to average it out. Two in three veterans die.
