Thank you, Chair, honourable members of the committee and fellow presenters.
I am Dr. Joseph Blanchard. I'm a veteran of approximately 30 years. I'm the founder of VeCATS, Veterans Career Assistance and Transition Services, and have been there for 12 years. In the last six years, I've started an organization called the Veterans Entrepreneurship Hub, known as Vet-Hub.
Approximately 6,000 Canadian Forces members transition out of the service every year. These individuals bring with them a lot of skills: leadership under pressure, operational planning experience, logistics, security, technical expertise and a mission-first mindset. Despite these strengths, many face a critical question: Where do I fit into our civilian economy? For a growing number, the answer is entrepreneurship, but the system is not built for them. You've heard this in all of your recent meetings.
As for the core problem, veterans are not failing because of the lack of capability. They are facing systemic barriers, which include a lack of structured transition pathways into business ownership; limited access to coordinated training, mentorship and funding; a procurement system that today takes about three to five years, which is far too long for a start-up company to survive; difficulty translating military experience into business credibility; and the loss of identity, purpose and sense of community post-service.
Approximately 20% of all start-ups in Canada fail within the first year, often due to a lack of support systems, not a lack of talent. Through VeCATS programs, we support veterans in their transition. We help them with identity and career paths, building the skills that they need to survive in the civilian world and connecting them to opportunities that are available. However, we quickly realized that something larger was needed. This is where we started the Veterans Entrepreneurship Hub. The Vet-Hub is designed by veterans, for veterans, to enable successful business creation and growth.
Our model is simple. It's an infrastructure that brings together five critical components. One is training and education, which leverages the ETB, the veterans education and training benefit, and some of the CAF transition policies that are available. We have mentorship and leadership development, which will be a huge and critical part of Vet-Hub. Access to capital—or what I call the “financial runway”—for a business to be successful will include items such as start-up money for home-based businesses, angel investors, venture capital and, of course, access to government programs, with shared services and business supports very similar to what we get in the military.
You have a centralized component that will reduce significant barriers for these companies, where we centralize the HR function, the finance function, the marketing function and, of course, operational support. There's also procurement access and acceleration, which will create pathways for veteran-owned businesses to sell into government faster. One of those components, which I can speak to later, is the discussions with the deputy minister and her assistant deputy minister over at Public Services and Procurement Canada.
The strategic opportunity for us in Canada is where Vet-Hub becomes more than a support program and becomes a national strategic asset so that veterans are security-cleared, operationally experienced, and trusted within the defence and public safety environments. With the right structure, they can help accelerate innovation in defence, security and public services, and they can reduce procurement timelines from three to five years today to 12 to 18 months. That's based on a couple of factors. Number one is the security clearances for veteran-owned business. This aligns directly, of course, with Canada's priorities in defence innovation and supply chain resiliency, including economic growth.
What we are asking for is the ability not to build something from scratch but to formalize and scale Vet-Hub, and specifically to establish Vet-Hub as a national entrepreneurship ecosystem comparable to the women's, Black and indigenous entrepreneurship programs from over the last six years, which have received funding.
Creating a veterans' procurement—