Veterans Affairs Committee on Nov. 20th, 2025

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 13 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on September 18, 2025, the committee is resuming its study on suicide prevention among veterans.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the Standing Orders.

Before we continue, I would ask all in-person participants to consult the guidelines written on the cards on the table. These measures are in place to help prevent audio feedback incidents and to protect the health and safety of all participants, including our interpreters.

I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of our witnesses who are with us today and for members. Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking. For those on Zoom, at the bottom of your screen, you can select the appropriate channel for interpretation: floor, English or French. For those in the room, you can use the earpiece and select the desired channel.

This is a reminder that all comments should be addressed through the chair.

For members in the room, if you wish to speak, please raise your hand. For members on Zoom, please use the “raise hand” function.

The committee clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best we can. We would like to thank you for your patience and understanding.

I would now like to welcome our witnesses.

I know you're in Australia, so first I want to say thank you very much to both of you.

We have Professor Ben Wadham of Flinders University, who is the director of the Open Door initiative for improving the well-being of veterans, public safety personnel and their families. From the Government of Australia's Department of Veterans' Affairs, we have Professor Jonathan Lane, chief psychiatrist. Thank you for being with us again.

We will start by giving each of you approximately five minutes to present your opening remarks. The rest of the hour will be dedicated to a question and answer session with the members of the committee.

I would like to start with Professor Wadham.

I would invite you to speak for five minutes. Thank you very much.

[Ben Wadham, Professor, Flinders University and Director, Open Door Initiative, As an Individual]

Thank you.

Good morning, everyone.

I'm Professor Ben Wadham. I'm the director of the Open Door research initiative for improving the well-being of veterans, public safety personnel, and their families in South Australia.

I am a veteran. I served in the Australian Defence Force from 1987 to 1995. I had a very good career, obviously with some absolutely brilliant experiences and some difficult experiences, as you do in the military. I began really researching the military very strongly in 2003, so I've been doing that for 20 years. I've focused on some issues that really address veteran suicidality.

I'm currently conducting an Australian Research Council discovery project called “Veteran Suicide: Investigating the Social and Historical Dimensions”. The main focus of our research is not only to encapsulate the biopsychological elements of the research, but also to provide a different perspective or a more holistic perspective by looking at the social implications of veteran suicidality.

We know that when people come out of deployment, or even while in service, they have experiences that may have exposed them to trauma, but we can increase our preventative efforts by focusing on some really key issues. Transition is one of them, which is a key point of opportunity and challenge. We need to ensure that we have the right systems and services in place to do that. We recently had a royal commission in Australia, and that certainly has been one of their main recommendations—to produce a very strong transition element.

The research I've done has looked at veterans who have been overseas or in service. There are a number of reasons they are led to contemplate taking their own lives. There are two issues. There is the deployment and service side of things, but there is also the institutional side of things. I think that's a main point, and it's one that, when we testified to the royal commission, was an absolutely central point. We have to look at systems and cultures as much as we look at the more accepted issues around deployment.

Issues of system and culture mean that we have to look at the way in which the military justice system is used. Recently in Australia, we had an inquiry into the weaponization of the military justice system, which I sat on. The key point there was that in any military, there is significant command discretion. There's a strong class system between commissioned and non-commissioned officers, and if that is not regulated effectively, it can lead to the exploitation of that power and then lead to bad outcomes for our veterans. While PTSD is a very significant issue for veterans, particularly if they're exposed to trauma, the other side of things is institutional betrayal and moral injury.

Another big focus of the royal commission—and one that we brought to them—was that we not only have to look at what we expect when we join the military—that is the cost of war—but also incorporate an understanding of the costs of service.

The royal commission had 122 recommendations. They focused on things such as a national study into military sexual assault and the establishment of an independent body—that's recommendation 122—to oversee the recommendations, the rolling out, and also to hear other issues that come forth at the time.

We've looked at moving transition away from defence and into the DVA. We've looked at a well-being work group that will oversee well-being. We have also looked at the reconstruction of the veterans sector, and we're looking at developing a peak body to oversee that.

There's a whole range of other issues, as well. For example, veteran employment is a big piece. That's the focus we bring to this area. There may be mental health issues, but if we can get employment, education, housing, mobility, identity, purpose and belonging right, then those are major preventative issues for veteran suicidality.

I would say that, in my research, with over 300 interviews now, social disconnection is, for me, the overwhelming issue. That is an issue that we can prevent really effectively just by wrapping services, knowledge, wisdom, experience and empathy around veterans when they're in service, when they leave service and even years after their service when they're out, well into their civilian lives.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Thank you very much, Professor Wadham.

I would like to invite Professor Lane to speak for five minutes, please.

[Jonathan Lane, Chief Psychiatrist, Department of Veterans' Affairs, Government of Australia]

Good morning, Madam Chair and members of the committee.

As some background, like Ben, I joined the army at the ripe old age of 17, in 1989, and had 10 years as a soldier. During that time, I did an arts degree in English lit and psychology part-time, and then an honours degree in psychology, before being sponsored as a full-time medical student with the army. I then served in the army as a doctor for a period of time, before transferring to the reserves and doing my training as a psychiatrist.

I deployed to Afghanistan in 2013 and was embedded at the role 3 in Kandahar as a mental health provider. After finishing my fellowship, I completed a Ph.D. looking at culturally specific transdiagnostic and peer-led programs for military veterans and emergency services personnel. Through this, along with my other clinical work, I ended up being involved in the royal commission into veteran suicide, the same as Ben, and eventually I started working with our veterans' affairs department. Last year, in July, Secretary Alison Frame created the position of chief psychiatrist, and I was appointed to that.

In my clinical work and my history and engagement as a soldier, and then as a doctor and a psychiatrist, I've had to be deeply involved in suicide and suicidality because it's so commonly associated with mental health problems. As Ben identified, there are also a number of other key factors that need to be addressed when we look at this particular population group, such as service culture, cultural conditioning and service identity.

As Ben also identified, those become vulnerabilities either when service systems and processes are weaponized, which includes military sexual abuse, or when the person transitions out. This involves how they navigate that process, which is actually a transition of identity, a transition of community and a transition of culture, along with needing to find some new sense of purpose and meaning. This can be particularly difficult when the person has mental health concerns or physical injuries, such as wounds and things like that.

My work in the department around suicide and suicidality has come from a number of different positions. This is primarily because, to a psychiatrist, mental health concerns and suicide are obviously not uncommon things. That was something I saw first-hand in my uniformed service as well.

When we're talking about suicide, we absolutely need to talk at the individual level, but we also need to include community, as Ben identified, and then services and processes from the government and from the wider health systems themselves. On suicide itself, in Australia, for example, our Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has been collecting suicide data for defence and the veterans community since 2017. The figures for 2023 were 78 serving and ex-serving members who unfortunately died by suicide. That was actually lower than it had been in previous years, and the numbers have been trending down, which does suggest that we're doing something good.

The problem with these numbers, even though that's a high figure, is that they're actually relatively low. Suicide in general is significantly complex and very nuanced in terms of what happens when, how and why, in particular. The data we've seen from Australia shows that up to 70% of people who do end up dying by suicide aren't actually engaged in our veterans' affairs system at all. While it's really important to have veteran-friendly services, we also need to ensure that services in the wider system, both in the public and the private systems, are engaged in things as well.

One of the things I'm very proud to say I've been working on is our department's national suicide prevention plan. This has been developed in conjunction with the national suicide prevention office for Australia and their plan as well. I've provided copies of that to the clerk for your information, which we can discuss at a later date.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Thank you very much to both of you, again.

Thank you for your service to your country, sirs. We've been looking forward to hearing your perspective from Australia.

On that note, I will invite MP Wagantall to go ahead for six minutes to start the conversation.

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

Thank you so much, Chair.

Thank you for being here today. I'm very excited to be able to ask you some questions.

We have a lot in common, Canada and Australia. An issue I have been exposed to—for the last decade, actually—is the mental health impact on those of our serving members and veterans who were exposed to mefloquine. I notice that, in recommendation 61, you talk specifically about establishing a brain injury program that covers the various sections of the military “and serving and ex-serving members exposed to mefloquine and/or tafenoquine.”

In 61(b), you say, “assess and treat neurocognitive issues affecting serving and ex-serving members, whatever their cause”. Has the Australian government—the Department of Veterans' Affairs—identified, specifically, mefloquine toxicity as a cause in treating mental health and brain stem injuries?

[Jonathan Lane]

Thank you. That's an interesting question.

Both mefloquine and tafenoquine were prescribed and used during our Australian campaigns in Southeast Asia, and in Pacific areas as well. There was a significant amount of distress, in the 2000s, about the potential harms from both of these medications. As a result of that, a cognitive testing program was actually established. Unfortunately, it wasn't taken up very well, and there wasn't a significant amount of data that came from that.

That sort of research in that era, though, then led to one of the signature issues around service in the military, in particular during periods of high operational tempo. In Australia, just like in Canada, the great war on terror has meant two decades of exposure to significant low-level blast injuries and potential traumatic brain injuries as well, and in—

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

Can I interrupt? I'm sorry. I want to ask about that, then. You indicate that, with this particular issue, you should “record members' exposure to traumatic brain injury and minor traumatic brain injury, including in medical records”. Obviously, it has been established that mefloquine does cause a brain stem injury. For those who have had concerns, do you have actual records, then, indicating that they were impacted by taking that particular antimalarial drug?

[Jonathan Lane]

No, I'm afraid we don't, as far as I'm aware.

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

Why would that be?

[Jonathan Lane]

Basically, long story short, there are a range of potential causes for cognitive decline and, then, various other sorts of injuries as well. When you're talking about cognitive functioning, that was the primary complaint from people who were being prescribed those medications. The actual mechanism of injury for a physical injury, like the blast from a blast overpressure, which might cause mild traumatic brain injury or something more significant, causes physical lesions because of the physical mechanism of injury, as opposed to pharmacological, chemical, hormonal and so on.

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

I do understand that. The reality is that there is significant information around the world now in regard to this, so I would love to see Canada do far more to identify and to take responsibility for our soldiers, who have been impacted by that drug since Somalia, for sure, right up until Afghanistan. Now our surgeon general has indicated it as a drug of last resort rather than first resort.

I appreciate that. I think we need to work together on this particular issue.

That being said, I have a question, then, about one of the other issues, around privacy. In your study, recommendation 74 is “Clarify the application of the Privacy Act to veterans to determine whether amendments are necessary”.

Quite often, at this committee, we're trying to determine how many veterans have been in certain circumstances and whatnot, and we often hear that we can't really know, because it's up to them. We don't have that opportunity, because of the Privacy Act. Is this something, then, that you're also experiencing?

[Jonathan Lane]

Absolutely, and it's the bane of my life as an academic, as a clinician and as a member of our Department of Veterans' Affairs. When we talk about privacy, this includes serving personnel and their health records. That data can't leave Defence, unfortunately, which means that, when someone leaves Defence, that data is given to them in a file, and that's it; there are no systematic records kept. Going forward as well, we don't have a veteran specifier or identifier, so we can't track health care usage and various other things.

[Cathay Wagantall, Conservative, Yorkton—Melville, SK]

On that point, looking at this privacy issue, have you considered making it a requirement that...or is there a way to give people who are leaving and becoming veterans the opportunity to agree that they want their privacy to be somewhat limited to allow Veterans' Affairs to be able to deal with their needs after they leave service?

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Be very brief, sir, because our time has expired. I'll leave you maybe 10 seconds to answer Mrs. Wagantall, please.

[Jonathan Lane]

Yes, very much so. People leaving Defence have a veteran identifier in terms of their card so that they can access services, and then we can collect health usage data around that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Thank you very much, Professor.

Mr. Casey, you have six minutes.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

Thank you to our witnesses for being with us. It's a challenge for that to happen from the other side of the globe, and we appreciate that you've made that effort and shown your interest in our study. We appreciate it very much.

We had a witness testify before us a couple of days ago who was passionate about psilocybin-aided therapy. He basically pointed to Australia as the global gold standard for the implementation and acceptance of this.

I'd be interested to know a bit more about it. What is the status of psilocybin-assisted therapy in your country? Can you take us through how you were able to get social licence for this to happen? There is undoubtedly a stigma in this country around psychedelics and a stigma around alternative therapies. I'd be interested in the Australian experience in that regard.

[Jonathan Lane]

Thank you, sir.

That's a very interesting question and a very timely question, because our Therapeutic Goods Administration allowed the use of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression, and MDMA, the party drug, for treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder. This is effectively under clinical trial-type conditions and as a means of last resort.

Our Department of Veterans' Affairs opened up applications to fund treatment for this literally two weeks ago. This is basically the first time, I think, that a government agency has funded this kind of treatment, and it's not cheap. We're talking about $30,000 to $35,000 per course of treatment for each individual, and the requirements that we're using to manage this are relatively strict as well.

From a departmental perspective, our guidelines are that the person has to currently have a treating psychiatrist and a treating psychologist. They have to have been in treatment over the last 12 months continuously, at a minimum, but typically longer. They have to have tried other therapies, and there must be evidence that there's been an effective duration at an effective dose for the psychological therapies and the pharmacotherapies, and that they're not using other medications, in particular psychoactives—medicinal cannabis and ketamine being the two primary ones that would be disallowed while someone is undergoing these sorts of therapies.

The evidence isn't where the public would like it to be, unfortunately. As clinicians, we are talking about treatments that are publicly funded and that are significantly expensive. The body of evidence isn't necessarily there to say that they work to the standard that people would like them to work. You can see this from the applications through the federal drug administration in the U.S. and the fact that this still hasn't gained traction in the U.S. in that particular way.

This is an early intervention and an early form of experiment, and we're requiring quite significant outcome evidence to be able to demonstrate whether this is going to be effective over the longer term and, therefore, whether it would continue to be funded.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Thank you very much.

Professor Wadham, in your opening remarks you talked about moving transition from Defence to Veterans' Affairs. I'm quite interested to hear the rationale behind that, and the challenges that led up to arriving at that solution.

[Ben Wadham]

Sure, and I'll just say that Jonathan might be able to fill in a bit more on the departmental side of that.

We've recognized that transition has been a challenge probably for a very long time, but particularly during the last 10 to 12 years there has been a lot of government activity around understanding transition. We had “The Constant Battle” report in 2016, which really honed in on that subject matter due to some veterans who had taken their lives.

There is a challenge broadly about what the interests of Defence are in being the key piece in veteran transition. One of the narratives that come out is that Defence is focused on retention and serving those who are serving. The belief, then, is that they don't have all the interests in the right place to be actually leading transition.

Out of “The Constant Battle” report, there was the development of a departmental transition body. I'm forgetting the acronym now. Do you remember what they were called, Jon?

[Jonathan Lane]

It was the joint transition authority.

[Ben Wadham]

Yes, JTA, that's it. That had a shelf life of maybe five to six years, but it wasn't achieving the outcomes that we were looking at.

There are a range of issues that we need to consider in transition. One of them is thinking about transition well before you leave. Another one is about the sharing of information between Defence and DVA. We have a card system in Australia—white, orange and gold cards—so part of that discussion was about trying to get veterans at least onto their white card and get their claims sorted before they left.

Another focus of transition is RPL or credit transfer. That's understanding the skills and experiences of veterans in different roles in the military, and obviously it's a bit more difficult when you're in a combat corps to translate those skills when you get out into civvy street. Obviously, if you can recognize those skills and then find a pathway of education and employment in transition, then that's a better outcome than not being able to achieve that translation, so Australia is doing a lot of work in that. The Department of Veterans' Affairs has established a three-round RPL process to try to get universities and post-secondary institutions to facilitate that RPL and—

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Mr. Wadham, I sincerely apologize. Just out of respect for all our members, I'm going to have to interrupt this wonderful train of thought. Keep this for the next round, sir.

On that note, now I will advise you that Madame Gaudreau will be asking her question in French, so please make sure that you have the right setting. She will speak for six minutes, asking you questions.

[Marie-Hélène Gaudreau, Bloc, Laurentides—Labelle, QC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Wadham, please feel free to ask me to repeat anything, if necessary. Your comments are valuable. Thank you for joining us.

Incidentally, I had the honour of visiting Australia to learn more about the country's democratic system and best practices.

I don't have much time. I'll get straight to the point.

Of the 122 recommendations made by the Australian Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide, which three matter the most to you and which ones do you think are most likely to help our veterans?