Veterans Affairs Committee on April 13th, 2026

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 28 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs. Pursuant to the Standing Orders and the motion adopted by the committee on Thursday, September 18, 2025, the committee is meeting on its study of barriers to entrepreneurship among veterans.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format. Pursuant to the Standing Orders, members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application.

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 and feedback incidents and to protect the health and safety of all participants, including the interpreters.

I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of the witnesses and our members.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference—and I know there are a few of you this morning—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. As a reminder, all comments should be addressed through the chair.

For members in the room, please raise your hand if you wish to speak. For members participating via Zoom, please use the “raise hand” function. The committee clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best we can. We appreciate your patience and understanding in this regard.

I would like to welcome back our members.

It's good to see you again this morning.

I would now like to welcome our first panel of witnesses. From Alberta Recoil Inc., we have Heather Vanderveer, owner. It's a pleasure, ma'am, to see you here. From Corporal4Life Apparel, we have Nicholas Stroesser, founder, by video conference. From Vimy Forge, we have Duncan McSporran, managing director, also by video conference. Thank you all for joining us today.

You will each have five minutes to give your opening remarks. We will then have a series of questions from members of the committee.

For those who are online, please note that after five minutes, I will have to interrupt you, as I will throughout the questions if members extend beyond their allocated time. I am the gatekeeper of our clock, so I apologize in advance if I have to interrupt you. We'll try to stay within those time frames.

I will now invite Mr. Nicholas Stroesser, founder of Corporal4Life Apparel, to take his five minutes.

[Nicholas Stroesser, Founder, Corporal4Life Apparel]

Good day. My name is Nick Stroesser, and I am the founder of Corporal4Life Apparel, a veteran-owned and veteran-operated apparel company out of Windsor, Ontario. Today, I will be speaking about the barriers I have faced as a veteran entrepreneur. Those barriers are hiring, mentorship and capital.

I started this clothing brand as a way to show my pride in serving Canada. Since 2015, it has become a brand sold across Canada and the United States. We've even shipped orders to Europe and Mexico. We've had three bricks-and-mortar retail stores. Our brand is currently available in two national museums, two regimental kit shops and one independent store in British Columbia.

We collaborate on a line of craft spirits with a veteran-owned distillery. We sponsor fighters, race-car drivers and a youth hockey team. With a portion of our sales, we've been able to donate tens of thousands of dollars to various veteran, first responder and local charities. Just saying all of this brings me great pride. I still have big goals for this company, which will be accomplished, but how much longer will it take?

I started this company with no retail experience, no T-shirt design experience, no advertising or content creation experience and, most importantly, no money. I have self-funded this venture since day one, sometimes putting myself in financial peril just to keep the dream alive.

I'm fortunate enough to say that I've made it through some very tough times. I've hired and fired entire staff more than once. I've used my personal paycheque from my own job to pay wages. I've used personal savings and credit to ensure my stores' rents would be paid on time. It's never been a question of “if” this brand will be a huge success; it's always been “when” and “how”.

My being a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces has been a huge factor in the survival of this company. We've pivoted multiple times. We've even had to take a few steps back to see the full picture, but the brand has always moved forward.

I cannot say that this has been a self-built brand, because I've had a lot of help along the way from family and friends who have stepped up as sales staff and from other successful entrepreneurs I've met who have guided me when I had no clue what I was doing. I've even been given a rent-free space to turn into a retail shop.

I've been part of mastermind groups where I've paid fees to learn from and interact with business owners from across North America. I have also helped up-and-coming veteran entrepreneurs who have reached out in seeking my advice, which is absolutely crazy to me, but it means that I'm doing something right.

While I can say that the biggest barriers I have faced as a veteran entrepreneur are due to my own actions or my failure to act, I will say that it would have been nice to learn in a shorter time period what I have learned so far. I'm going to talk about what I believe would have helped me and could help current and potential veteran entrepreneurs. Some of what I will discuss has been talked about at earlier meetings by my colleagues, Dave Morrow and Grig Potapenko.

The first thing I would like to let veterans know is that entrepreneurship is a possible choice after service, and if not to start their own business, then to purchase an existing business where the owner is retiring or looking to sell. I've been asked more than once if I was interested in purchasing a veteran-owned business. I've declined, but there may have been a veteran out there who could have purchased an established brand.

On hiring, as mentioned earlier, at one point Corporal4Life had two stores operating in two cities two hours apart. Because I had no idea where to look for serving members, military reservists or veterans looking for work, I used social media. I was able to recruit six employees for my London store and four for my Windsor store.

For my last store, in Oromocto, finding staff was very hard. After a three-month social media recruiting campaign, I ended up hiring the first people—and only four—who showed interest at the last minute. I'm currently facing a similar problem in trying to recruit staff for the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto this summer. I still don't know if there is a database for veterans in search of employment. I've been reaching out to reserve regiments and social media pages to get the word out.

A veteran-owned business job bank where veterans and reservists could find each other for employment would be an amazing tool for companies like mine. One of our goals at Corporal4Life is to have teams across the country that can act as ambassadors and sales staff for events where I cannot be, effectively giving us a national footprint, aside from our online shop.

The biggest issue since the beginning has been funding. I don't think Veterans Affairs should be funding veteran businesses, as it has more important things to do, but I do believe that if Veterans Affairs or the government partnered with national banks to offer veteran entrepreneurs low-interest funding or even grants, veteran businesses would grow faster and larger, and it could help smaller companies survive at least long enough to give it a go.

Aside from using my own money and borrowing at extremely high predatory interest rates, I have never had an investor or a business line of credit. As of now, 11 years into the business, we are finally debt-free and cash-flow positive.

At this point in the business, I feel like I've done pretty well, but in looking back, I wonder if, with some help, I could have had the same successes even earlier on. For any veteran entering the business world, I believe the path could be much shorter and less painful if they had the things that I did not have while building this brand.

I believe if I had had the mentor, the funding and the ability to find staff, the company would be much bigger, we might still have stores and we would be able to help many more veterans than we currently do. Again, though, I have learned a lot and become not only a better entrepreneur, but a better human being by building this brand.

In closing, if veteran entrepreneurs have access to mentorship, funding and staffing, we can create an ecosystem of entrepreneurs who could create jobs and economic growth here at home and give purpose to those leaving the forces.

Thank you for your time.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Thank you very much.

For five minutes, from Vimy Forge, we have Mr. Duncan McSporran.

[Duncan McSporran, Managing Director, Vimy Forge]

Madam Chair and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear today.

For everyone's benefit, I will continue in English rather than put my awful French to the test: It's mostly limited to the vocabulary of a soldier.

My name is Duncan McSporran. I'm a veteran of 24 years' service in the British Army, including time seconded to the United States Army, and more recently here in Canada, where I spent two and a half years at the Canadian Army infantry school, responsible for phase two officer training and technical and leadership development of infantry non-commissioned officers. I'm a four-time founder here in Canada since transitioning from my service at the infantry school at CFB Gagetown in 2012.

Currently, I work at the intersection of innovation and entrepreneurship as a general partner at Tidal Venture Partners, and I am a founder of Vimy Forge. This is a national not-for-profit innovation accelerator for small and medium technology companies in the defence sector that's based in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Although my current work is largely [Technical difficulty—Editor].

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

I am so sorry. We lost you. You muted yourself.

There you go. That's perfect.

[Duncan McSporran]

Although my current work is largely in defence and national security, my focus today is veteran entrepreneurship in general. Veterans I've worked with or mentored include brewers, distillers, plumbers, electricians and people involved in hybrid rocket motor companies, as well as people in more general technology start-ups and creative enterprises. Their focus on bringing success to Canada is clearly not confined to one sector. They all universally use the mindset and skills developed in service to build businesses, create jobs and contribute to the resilience of the Canadian economy.

Across my experience in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, the fundamentals of this discussion are consistent. Veterans bring leadership, discipline, resilience and a demonstrated ability to operate in uncertain, high-pressure conditions. They are trained to take responsibility, to make decisions with incomplete information and to execute in complex environments. These are not abstract qualities. They align directly with what is required to build and sustain a business.

Where the difference emerges is not in the veteran. It is in the system they enter after service. In the United States, there is a clearer institutional and cultural signal that military service is a foundation for continued economic participation, including entrepreneurship. There are identifiable pathways through training, procurement and capital that make starting a business feel like a viable, supported next step. In the United Kingdom, although the scale is smaller, veteran networks, mentorship and targeted support create a relatively coherent environment for translating military experience into commercial activity.

In Canada, what I observe is different. We have strong individual programs, committed people and a number of very entrepreneurial veteran-led charities and networks. Organizations such as Treble Victor Group, True Patriot Love and several veteran-founded social ventures have themselves been built by veterans who saw a need and created something new. However, from the perspective of a member leaving service, these do not yet consistently present as a coherent system. What our veterans encounter is less a pathway and more a landscape of valuable elements that must be found, interpreted and stitched together, often at the moment when clarity would be most helpful for the veteran.

From our vantage point at Vimy Forge and Tidal Venture Partners, this shows up in three practical ways.

First, there does not appear to be a clear front door. A veteran who is curious about starting or acquiring a business does not reliably encounter a structural progression from initial interest to testing and validation, to launch and then to growth or, if necessary, to trying again after a setback. In practice, the veteran entrepreneur is left to navigate the system independently rather than be guided through it.

Second, there is a misalignment between the pace and nature of entrepreneurship and the design of veteran support systems. Entrepreneurship is iterative and non-linear. It involves experimentation, calculated risk and course correction. Support systems, by contrast, are often built around predictable, linear outcomes. As a result, the system is often experienced less as support and more as friction at critical moments.

Third, there is an underused opportunity to connect veteran entrepreneurship more deliberately to areas of national priority. These include defence, security and advanced technologies—where veterans bring operational insight into real-world challenges such as logistics, communications, decision-making under pressure and others—as well as sectors like infrastructure, manufacturing, energy, health and local services. Without deliberate pathways into these markets, veterans—often exactly the experienced end-users who define the agile methodology—are often positioned at the margins or even outside of the areas where their experience is directly relevant and can have the most impact.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Mr. McSporran, we're almost a minute over. I sincerely apologize. Please take 10 seconds to complete your statement, and then we'll go to our third witness.

[Duncan McSporran]

Absolutely. Thank you very much.

If I may leave the committee with one observation, it is this. The question is not whether veterans have the capacity to succeed as entrepreneurs. The question is whether our systems are structured in a way that allows that capacity to be discovered, supported and, when necessary, rebuilt after failure.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Thank you very much.

We'll go now to our third witness, Heather Vanderveer.

The floor is yours for five minutes.

[Heather Vanderveer, Owner, Alberta Recoil Inc.]

Chair and honourable members, I thank you for the opportunity to appear today.

My name is Heather Vanderveer. I'm a Canadian Armed Forces veteran and a co-founder of Alberta Recoil, a veteran-led organization providing peer support, advocacy, consulting and training for military members and veterans affected by operational stress injuries and military sexual trauma.

Before I continue, I would like to pass on regrets from my business partner John Senior, who wished to be here today to testify, but unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances, couldn't.

Today, I would like to speak to a gap within veterans policy that is often overlooked: Veteran entrepreneurship, particularly among female veterans, is not being adequately supported within existing systems. Despite commitments to gender equity and improved veteran outcomes, female business owners are still unintentionally being excluded from funding opportunities, partnerships and program development, especially when their work focuses on peer support, prevention, education and community well-being. These barriers are not always explicit, but they are persistent. Veterans bring significant strengths into entrepreneurship: discipline, mission focus, leadership under pressure, logistical problem-solving and, most of all, lived experience.

Veterans Affairs has acknowledged that military skills are transferable to business ownership. However, the system has not fully adapted to support veterans who choose entrepreneurship as their transition pathway.

Veteran entrepreneurs continue to face systemic challenges, including limited data and visibility, uncertainty around how business income interacts with VAC benefits, inconsistent decision-making when entrepreneurship is part of rehabilitation, transition times that do not align with the realities of building a business and administrative burdens that are particularly difficult for those managing service-related injuries. At its core, the system is designed to transition veterans into employment, not into building a business—and that distinction matters.

There is also an internal divide that must be acknowledged. Within veteran entrepreneurship, there is a noticeable gap between officers and non-commissioned members. Officers often transition with recognized credentials, stronger institutional networks and familiarity with procurement systems. These factors create clearer pathways to advisory roles and funded opportunities. Non-commissioned members, despite extensive operational leadership experience, often transition without those same networks or recognition. For women, particularly those from non-commissioned backgrounds, this gap is even more pronounced. They face a higher credibility threshold that directly impacts their ability to succeed.

Through Alberta Recoil, we have delivered structured, three-day peer support workshops specifically for veterans affected by military sexual trauma. To date, we have supported over 125 participants. These programs were developed in direct response to the complex realities of military sexual trauma and are delivered in trauma-informed environments that reflect military culture, barriers to disclosure and the long-term effects of institutional betrayal.

Despite this work, women veterans continue to struggle to access support for these programs. There is limited recognition, limited integration and very little institutional uptake. In fact, we have had more success working with the RCMP and partners in the United States than we have with our own veteran systems.

To my knowledge, Alberta Recoil remains the only organization in Canada providing structured, multi-day, MST-specific peer support programming of this kind. We have collaborated with the SMSRC, the military and the RCMP. We continue to show up, but credibility remains a barrier.

I will say this plainly. If my background were different and if I fit a more traditional or more accepted profile, this conversation might be very different.

What needs to change? First, entrepreneurship must be formally recognized as a legitimate transition and rehabilitation pathway within VAC policy. Second, there must be clear and consistent guidance on how business income interacts with benefits so that veterans are not discouraged from pursuing entrepreneurship. Third, funding and partnership opportunities must be more accessible to veteran-led organizations, including those led by women and non-commissioned members. Finally, credibility must be earned through outcomes, not assumed based on rank, gender or background.

Veteran entrepreneurs are not asking for special treatment. They are asking for the opportunity to contribute solutions, many of which the government has already identified as necessary. The capacity exists, the experience exists and the need is clear. The system simply needs to catch up.

I thank you, and I welcome your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Thank you very much.

Now we will start our round of questions. The first round will be six minutes for each member.

For those online, I apologize if I have to interrupt you. I try to be a very strict clock keeper.

Once it's her turn, Madame Gaudreau will be addressing you in French. Please make sure that you have the right channel on at the bottom, so you can hear Madame Gaudreau speak to you in French if you do not understand it.

We will start with six minutes for Ms. Wagantall.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to all of you for being here today. We really appreciate your service and your very important testimony in this regard.

I'm going to start very briefly with Ms. Vanderveer.

Thank you so much. Could you briefly explain to me how you came up with the name “Recoil”?

[Heather Vanderveer]

Yes, I can. Many people ask about that one. It's a military term. You take recoil after firing a weapon. Even more simply, when a child touches a stove, they recoil back and learn not to touch it. It's not damaging, but it's a learning process. That's where we came up with the name.

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

That is what I expected. Thank you so much. The reality, too, is that life is like that, and quite often we have to recoil. I appreciate the creativity in a lot of the names of organizations that veterans have in order to help each other.

You mentioned the struggles that you feel women entrepreneurs have. Interestingly, we had someone else speaking here about being an entrepreneur who simply noted—and was not negative at all in saying this—that there are pathways for women and indigenous and Black individuals to get assistance from VAC. Are you not able to access that? Just give me an idea of the impact of that on your ability to run your business.

[Heather Vanderveer]

We have actually applied for funding three years in a row, and we have not received any funding from the SMSRC or the veteran and family well-being fund.

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

Were you given a reason?

[Heather Vanderveer]

When we applied the first year, we had been listed as “for-profit”, which we had to change to “not-for-profit”, but we were never given a reason as to why we were not accepted. It was, “Thank you very much for your application; however....”

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

It would be interesting to follow up on that to see what the uptake is and where the money is being spent.

Mr. Stroesser from Corporal4Life, it sounds like you have a natural ability to be an entrepreneur and to hang in there through things—

[Nicholas Stroesser]

I appreciate that.

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

—although I hear your perspective as being very different. Entrepreneurship is not for everyone, and you clearly show tenacity.

You mentioned that one challenge you're facing is hiring. Do you hire veterans only?

[Nicholas Stroesser]

When I had my first store, I did. That was part of the experience. Serving reservists and veterans was the goal. I've opened it up to family members if need be. I noticed, when I had my stores, that people appreciate the fact that they're speaking to a veteran or a serving member while they're shopping our products.

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

I can appreciate this in light of what your specific business is. It is very veteran-centric. At the same time, a lot of veterans are pleased to be involved—simply to be an entrepreneur within the whole system. I have to applaud those of you who take on entrepreneurship simply because of your desire to serve other veterans. I appreciate that.

Mr. McSporran, I found it interesting that you talked about the incredible talents and gifts that our veterans bring to entrepreneurship. It was interesting to hear your perspective next to Ms. Vanderveer's in regard to the difference, quite honestly, in the uptake between officers and non-commissioned veterans and in their ability to get what they need and succeed.

Can you tell me where you focus most? I think we need an across-the-board approach, and yours seems to be focused more on the officer's side of the equation. Is that true or not?

[Duncan McSporran]

No, not at all. It is focused on the entrepreneur and on providing support, particularly on the technical side, for companies at Vimy Forge that meet a need and requirement in defence. It's quite often the junior person—I'm sure the other witnesses will echo this—who comes up with the best idea. It's helping them translate that into something that has meaning to the people who make decisions.

If there's one thing I would say, it's that it reflects some of the comments.... The officer is often better equipped and has been better trained to deal with those types of higher-level discussions to force the point and to just get on with stuff. It does appear—and it is clear—that the work Vimy Forge does is not focused on officers or anything else like that. It's simply about the people with the best ideas.

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

I have one minute left for you to respond to this. You talked about not having a clear front door and the steps available to succeed the first time, but you also mentioned “trying again”. This is, I think, really important to entrepreneurship.

Do you find a lot of circumstances where individuals fail initially? It's often not of their own accord, but it is a challenging way to earn a living and to provide a living for others. Where do you go with the “trying again” side of it? What do you do to encourage that? Canadians tend to be shy of that.

[Duncan McSporran]

It's about helping people understand that if they have a failure, it's not the end of the road. It's part of the learning process. It's a training environment in its own right, in many respects, and it's about having supporters who understand that as well.