Evidence of meeting #15 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 veteran.
A video is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Sean Casey Liberal Charlottetown, PE
Have you been able to bring the regulatory bodies on board to recognize this training for CME credits?
Cst Aaron Dale
We have everybody in place to do that, but there's a cost associated with it. All organizations won't move forward until that cost is addressed. Everything about this program has been a bottom-up, grassroots approach, but we need top-down to help drive this nationally so that no police service, no paramedic, no health care practitioner, firefighter or corrections officer doesn't know how to help.
Liberal
Sean Casey Liberal Charlottetown, PE
We have less than a minute. You gave three very specific recommendations on leadership, 988 and federal support to all health care professionals. Please use the last minute to flesh them out a bit.
Thanks.
Cst Aaron Dale
The Americans have a 988 anti-suicide line for the United States of America with a veteran-only option. We need that in Canada.
On top of that, we need every police officer, every firefighter, every paramedic and every correctional officer to know how to help a veteran. So far, I'm in 80 police services, which counts for about 79% of cops, but I need your help to make sure that every person who is a first responder in Canada knows how to help.
On top of that, all health care providers, private and public, are asking how to help military veterans. We need to teach them how to do that. We need a more top-down approach to direct and teach all of our public safety and health care professionals in Canada. In the whole system, the one-government approach, everybody works together to solve veteran homelessness, suicide and crisis. We need to work together as a team, and I think we can do that.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Marie-France Lalonde
Thank you very much, Constable Dale.
We have Mr. Viersen for five minutes.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
Thank you, Madam Chair.
I want to thank our witnesses for being here today as well.
Mr. Dale, we've heard from other witnesses around police reports having a check box that would recognize a veteran. I'm not familiar with how that would work. Are there check boxes already on police reports to identify people in situations, and would this just be adding another check box? What would that look like?
Cst Aaron Dale
The way the program works is that you're on a radio call or you're interacting with people. With our training, you start keying in on certain language, tattoos or clothing, and you think that maybe this person is a military veteran. Then you ask them if they're a military veteran, and they say yes. At this point, that Canadian is entitled to far more services than anybody else.
I know what I can offer a suicidal, homeless person in Toronto, and what I can offer a suicidal, homeless veteran in Toronto is exponentially more and exponentially better, but we need that pathway. Everybody needs that training to understand that person, because no homeless, suicidal veteran is walking around with a sign around their neck saying they're a veteran. With that training, we can identify them, and then we can connect them.
The majority of military veterans are not suicidal and are not homeless, so the Toronto police does not have their name and a veteran check mark beside that. I can't speak for all the other police services that may or may not identify people. What we will do is identify if a person is violent or if they carry a knife on them all the time. We'll make notes like that, but we will not make notes about their profession.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
That was the recommendation, particularly around a police report. I get the impression that there are a whole bunch of identifiers that are just check boxes and that “veteran” is not an item a police officer can check. Can you confirm that?
Cst Aaron Dale
I cannot confirm that, because every police service is going to do things differently. At Toronto police, we do not want to identify the persons as veterans in a check box. We will say things like, “They are suicidal, because they've been suicidal with us in the past.” We do not want to make the connotation that all veterans are suicidal and homeless, because that's not true.
I can't answer your question. It's going to be different for all police services.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
Generally, folks come and complain to us that they can't separate the veteran population out of the general population, because there's no identifier in most police reports.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
Would you suggest that we should have a better system of capturing?
It sounds like you're saying we don't necessarily want to identify veterans willy-nilly all the time. Are you saying that or not?
Cst Aaron Dale
That's the stance taken by Toronto police. They don't want to have a veteran identifier. When I type in your name, because we're on a radio call together, I don't want to see it splashed up as veteran. It would be the same if it splashed up as lawyer, doctor or teacher. We don't collect that stuff, and we don't want to. We will gather safety information. That's currently what's happening right now, but this is a bit above me.
At this point, for Toronto, we want to train our people to understand the veteran culture, so what they see they can jog their memory. They could say, “Maybe I should ask this person if he or she is a veteran, because he or she is wearing military boots, or because I see a coin collection in the house, or because I saw this picture on the corner stand.”
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
Okay. Your recommendation would be the opposite of what we have recommended before. You wouldn't want veterans identified just because they're veterans, is that correct?
Cst Aaron Dale
That's the stance taken by Toronto police from what I understand. It's what I also believe. There are 200-plus different systems that are not going to make that easy.
Conservative
Arnold Viersen Conservative Peace River—Westlock, AB
That's interesting.
Mr. Plourde, you said that we can't identify the successes. My colleagues picked up on this, as well. It seems to me that, from my estimation, there's about one veteran suicide a week. If a week goes by, and we don't have a veteran suicide, that would make it a success.
Would you verify that this would be a correct kind of statement? Would that be an appropriate mechanism to measure success?
CD, Founder and Administrator, The Trail – Transition Housing Inc.
As you mentioned, any human being going away is a tragedy. For me, it was a figure of speech. One veteran suicide a day...I don't know. We have people who need help and need prevention to at least stop them from falling.
In institutions, we have a process. We need numbers, data, check marks and graphs. We almost wait for people to crash, saying, “Oh, we saved somebody”, instead of doing the prevention that we cannot account for....
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Marie-France Lalonde
Thank you very much, Mr. Plourde.
I will now give the floor to Ms. Royer.
Liberal
Zoe Royer Liberal Port Moody—Coquitlam, BC
Thank you.
Thank you very much for your service, Mr. La Salle, Mr. Plourde and Constable Dale.
Listening to your testimony has been very moving today. I'll share a bit of context. My husband served 22 years in the air force. He is a vet. His last tour was in the Bosnian war, which was a genocide by all accounts. Gaetan was wearing the blue beret. He was a military engineer in the air force, but wearing the blue beret as part of the United Nations peacekeeping force. He mainly created lines of separation among warring factions to protect people. He was there at that time.
On many nights, he slept in bathtubs as nearby buildings were being bombed. He was trying to survive, while experiencing sensory overload, and helping others survive. As an engineer, he was rebuilding systems, including water systems, sewage systems and things that help keep people safe at a terrible time. He witnessed gangs of parentless children, aged 4 to 14, searching for food, and packs of ownerless dogs that were also very hungry and preying on people. He would go through different checkpoints and sometimes be held at gunpoint as he moved between them. Transiting the region was very difficult.
He came back after 14 months to mundanity: children who were upset that they had to do their homework, a woman yelling at the bus driver for going too far past and nearly missing the stop and those kinds of things.
Constable Dale, as you said, there's a culture and training that tell you that you have to suffer through the pain, you cannot quit and you cannot show any sign of weakness. I think that's why we see the PTSD and the internal trauma persist, along with the inability to talk about it. My question is around that.
Would it help if, along the way, there was more connection to family? Naval ships are away for months at a time, as are submarines. Troops go on active duty and, sometimes, successive tours. We're more connected than ever before through digital means. People could have that sense of family being close. Mr. La Salle, you might have been closer to your sons throughout an enduring process.
What would it mean to make sure that there is the element of feeling supported by and closely connected to your family? You could be in the conversation about homework or the birthday you might have missed. Many anniversaries would pass without you being able to be present. Would that make a difference?
My question is for Mr. La Salle first and then Mr. Plourde.
As an Individual
That's a good question. I didn't deploy overseas at all, so I don't have that experience. Maybe Lieutenant-Colonel Plourde or Constable Dale could speak to that.
I think there is a disconnect—and there was a disconnect for me after I got hurt. It's a change for the family. My boys had an active, fun, outgoing dad who suffered traumatic injuries and, at the same time, became very closed. They struggled through the process too, and there wasn't really a lot of support for the family during that time. That made it difficult.
Liberal
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Marie-France Lalonde
Thank you very much.
I apologize.
Ms. Gaudreau, you have the floor for two and a half minutes.
Bloc
Marie-Hélène Gaudreau Bloc Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Thank you very much, Madam Chair.
Dr. Brend, can you tell us about the red tape associated with shelters, which is so complex it's enough to drive one crazy?
I know that this adds to the trauma experienced by veterans transitioning to civilian life, but how bad is it?
Assistant Professor, Université Laval, As an Individual
As I'm listening, one of the things that strike me is that we can have better services and we can find amazing ways of working, but if the system that administers them is the same and is not trauma-informed, it will continue to do harm.
When we think about the term “trauma-informed,” a lot of times it sounds like a buzzword: “Oh, we just have to know that's an issue.” It's not a buzzword. It's about understanding that everything you do and the entire approach you do it with can either serve to improve things or make things worse.
I would say that for Veterans Affairs to be trauma-informed would be to hold a mirror to itself and look at all of its functioning systematically and ask, “Does what we're doing and how we're doing it adhere to our very important mission, and is it trauma-informed? How will this land for the people who will receive it, and does it further what we want to do?”
It's critical that we place the need for the services themselves to be reviewed and to be made trauma-informed so they can also better support these excellent initiatives we're hearing about today, where we see that veterans in the community are effectively organizing, are leaders and are creating unbelievable.... It's just so impressive what you're doing. We don't have to worry about that. It's happening. Our veterans are incredible, but do we have the container that can hold that and promote that and put it into action through support?