Veterans Affairs Committee on April 20th, 2026

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Welcome to meeting number 30 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Veterans Affairs.

Pursuant to Standing Orders 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on November 25, 2025, the committee is meeting to study the monitoring of the rehabilitation services contract awarded to Partners in Canadian Veterans Rehabilitation Services, or PCVRS.

Before we continue, I would ask that all in-person participants 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 benefits of the witnesses and the members.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. If you are participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to speak. Please mute yourself when you are not speaking.

Those on Zoom, at the bottom of your screen, you can select the appropriate channel for interpretation: floor, English or French. Those in the room, you can use the earpiece and select the desired channel.

I would now like to welcome the witnesses.

We have, as an individual, Pascale Marier‑Deschênes, assistant professor, Université Laval, who is joining us by video conference.

As an individual, we have Mr. Michael Parsons, registered psychiatric nurse. From CRUX Psychology, we have Dr. Simon Sherry, by video conference.

Each witness will have five minutes for their opening remarks. Afterwards, we will have a round of questions with committee members.

Those who are online, I'm very rigid on the five minutes. I will do my very best not to interrupt you, so please try to stay within that guideline. We would appreciate it. Thank you very much.

We will start with Dr. Simon Sherry for five minutes.

[Dr. Simon Sherry, CRUX Psychology]

Thank you.

Canada is operating in an increasingly unstable global environment. As we strengthen our armed forces, it's equally important to strengthen our care of those who have already served. Supporting current and former military members is not only a moral responsibility but also essential to sustaining a capable and resilient defence system.

My name is Dr. Simon Sherry. I'm a clinical psychologist and a professor at Dalhousie University. I'm also the chief psychologist at CRUX Psychology, a psychology practice focused on evidence-based assessment and treatment. CRUX is one of the largest service providers in the PCVRS network. We deliver psychological assessment and treatment to veterans across Atlantic Canada, working closely with PCVRS.

To give the committee a sense of scale, I'll briefly summarize our activities with PCVRS. Since 2024, PCVRS has booked 283 therapy clients with CRUX. That averages out to about 4.35 new therapy clients per week. We've also served PCVRS by conducting roughly 160 assessments since 2024.

I want to point out why PCVRS leans heavily on our team. In Atlantic Canada, demand for psychological services far exceeds supply. Many veterans face multimonth wait-lists—which can stretch into seasons, not just weeks—and these delays are problematic. Problems don't just remain static. They worsen. Symptoms can fester and grow on wait-lists. For these individuals, time is not a neutral variable. Time is a risk factor, so we built CRUX to try to address that. We pride ourselves on providing timely and accessible services—typically within a week—to PCVRS clients.

We commonly work with PCVRS. I want to acknowledge some of the excellent service they provide. For instance, I meet regularly with Brittany Blacklock. She really helps our team provide efficient services. I've also drawn upon the support of Dr. Sylvie Bourgeois, the clinical lead at PCVRS. She can provide very timely and expert assistance. It's appreciated.

What really stands out for us is how the rehabilitation services specialists—you might call them case managers—deeply care about the veterans they serve. I'll highlight what I think are a few strengths of PCVRS. One would be that they provide timely care. They do a good job of connecting veterans to services. The other thing I've noticed is that the case managers can be quite proactive. They will reach out. They will drive action. This is a supportive work environment where a sense of collaboration is strong. PCVRS has also shown some flexibility in that they seem to be able to adapt some of their processes to the clinical realities we face in providing care, and that responsiveness to feedback is important.

PCVRS is also big and bureaucratic, which comes with some pros and cons. On the pro side, that larger bureaucracy allows for digital portals and structured workflows that a lot of third party providers can't offer. Clearly, there are challenges in working with PCVRS as well. For instance, they're bureaucratically intense, so reporting expectations are high and timelines can be tight. I think this is ultimately good because it helps with accountability and continuity of care, which benefit the veterans we serve.

I also want to acknowledge that some veterans have expressed frustration with both PCVRS and CRUX at times. Their experiences really matter. We should listen and have their experiences inform ongoing improvements.

If you're going to evaluate any sort of rehabilitation program, including PCVRS, I also think it's essential to understand the scientific limits of treatment response. Veterans who enter rehabilitation often have chronic, complex problems with multiple comorbidities—PTSD, depression, pain, addiction and personality disorders—intertwined in these presentations. It can create treatment-resistant forms of illness. Sometimes veterans present, also, with complex medical discharge histories, following years of complicated interactions with medical professionals.

If you think of a relatively uncomplicated case of PTSD, you could expect moderate improvement, but when you add chronicity, comorbidities and functional impairment, as is often seen in military populations, those treatment response rates certainly don't improve. I think we have to evaluate PCVRS and our efforts at CRUX in relation to the current limits of psychological science and acknowledge that we're often seeing difficult cases in difficult circumstances.

No provider, whether that's CRUX or PCVRS, can outperform the underlying science or what you might see in clinical trials, where complex cases are often excluded. For these reasons, we need to realistically evaluate PCVRS's performance against benchmarks that are grounded in scientific evidence and consider what's realistically achievable.

In closing, I support rigorous, evidence-based oversight of all rehabilitation programs, including PCVRS. From our vantage point, CRUX works and PCVRS works. Veterans are being connected to timely, evidence-based care in a way that was less possible under previous models—

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Thank you.

[Dr. Simon Sherry]

Most importantly, I think we have to be committed to continuous improvement.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Thank you very much, Dr. Sherry. I'm sorry. As I said, I have the time beside me.

Ms. Marier‑Deschênes, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Pascale Marier-Deschênes, Assistant Professor, Université Laval, As an Individual]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I am a professor at Université Laval and a researcher at the Centre interdisciplinaire de recherche en réadaptation et en l'intégration sociale, or CIRRIS. I did my initial training in social work, but I now teach at the Faculty of Medicine. Most of my pedagogical and research projects involve veterans living with chronic pain, so that's really what I want to focus on today. I also work closely with health care professionals and veterans' family members.

My goal with the veterans I work with is to develop a set of online resources to better support anyone working with veterans to manage their chronic pain, starting with the veterans themselves, their loved ones, future health and social services professionals, so our students at Université Laval, as well as current professionals. I work more specifically to develop training and adapt a chronic pain self-management program to the military culture.

In that context, I work with veterans and health care professionals listening closely to their experiences to better understand the services that are available. The main thing my partners sometimes tell me is that PCVRS rehabilitation professionals lack knowledge related to the management of certain health problems characterized by chronic pain.

This can sometimes lead to an intensity of services being maintained although it may not be suited to best practices in cases of fibromyalgia, for example, exacerbating problems rather than promoting rehabilitation. Managing the chronic pain of someone with fibromyalgia by constantly pushing them over their limit in order to keep with a fixed framework, such as two hours of rehabilitation three times a week with a professional, is likely to lead to an increase in pain and associated symptoms, such as fatigue.

People have told me they've had to take time to recover from the rehabilitation program itself because it made their situation worse. Let me give you an example. A man had to start using a cane during his rehabilitation — I focus more on the physical aspect of rehabilitation than the psychological aspect — because his rehabilitation program was so intense, it ended up exacerbating his issues. Things returned to the previous normal level a month and a half after he finished his rehabilitation.

Another veteran whose pain was well managed and stable through self-management before rehab services began had to stop rehab altogether after seven weeks. She was unable to continue, even though she'd said several times it was too much. This suggests the government is imposing a one-size-fits-all service model, which is not unlike the armed forces model designed for men.

People also told me they'd already had follow-ups or had appointments scheduled when they started the rehabilitation program but it wasn't necessarily taken into consideration. This leads to a very high level of service intensity.

Also, and I think it's been widely reported, I was told wait times were long, up to a year, before the first rehabilitation services appointment. These delays are directly related to the fact that services must be provided by a PCVRS network provider.

Another issue is where the assessments and treatments are being done. Since claimants aren't necessarily evenly distributed across the country, the distance they have to travel to be assessed or treated by providers located far from major centres not only causes frustrations, but it can also lead them to abandon the rehabilitation program. Therefore, the remote location of chronic pain management providers may explain the decrease in people attending their appointments, specifically among this clientele.

If someone lives in Quebec City or Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier, for example, and has to go to Lévis to be assessed, the drive alone may end up increasing their perceived pain and make them arrive at their appointment less willing to do the prescribed rehabilitation exercises.

If those trips happen three times a week, that obviously creates challenges. People have told me the loss of services that were previously more accessible nearby is a big problem.

Finally, I was told veterans who had been assessed, who were receiving services from the Operational Stress Injury Clinic, or OSIC, in Quebec City, and who had to be reassessed—

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Ms. Marier‑Deschênes, I have to interrupt. I'm so sorry, but you can't see me when I wave at you.

You'll have a chance to finish your remarks when answering questions from committee members. I'm so sorry to have to cut you off.

For five minutes, we have Mr. Parsons.

[Michael Parsons, Registered Psychiatric Nurse, As an Individual]

Thank you.

My name is Michael Parsons. I'm a registered psychiatric nurse in Alberta. I took on a position with PCVRS as an RSS last year. Prior to that, I had positions with Correctional Service Canada, Alberta Health Services, Recovery Alberta and the Department of National Defence as a mental health nurse.

During my time working for PCVRS, I witnessed a few issues coming across that convinced me to resign. A lot of the issues that I was presented with while working through PCVRS breached my code and principles of ethics under my College of Registered Psychiatric Nurses of Alberta training.

I'm also a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces. I served 15 years. I decided not to wear my medals today because of some of the stuff I witnessed while working for PCVRS. A lot of the time, a lot of veterans were questioned about the integrity of their service and what they were saying. I chose not to wear my medals today because of that, so you can take me a bit seriously when I discuss some of the issues I came across while working for PCVRS.

The first issue that I came across while working with PCVRS was actually during the training. What I noticed was that, even at a director or management level, they were not familiar with a lot of the transitional services that VAC, SISIP or even the Department of National Defence offers during release or medical release. This took up a lot of time. There were a lot of frustrating moments trying to discuss this, especially around SISIP, to the point that I had one of the directors ask me, “Can we purchase SISIP and take over its services, because it's an inconvenience to us?” There were a lot of disagreements and a lot of not being familiar with the services provided.

The second portion, which one of the other witnesses already mentioned, is that they do not follow best practices, especially around approval for treatments. There were a few treatments for clients, including things like ECT or TMS, that were recommended by some of the assessing psychologists or psychiatrists. A lot of the responses to these treatments, or other alternative treatments that the prescribing physician or the psychiatrist would offer, were “Our network does not offer that. Lifemark and PCVRS do not offer that treatment, so we cannot provide that treatment.” Meanwhile, the prescribing doctor, physician or psychiatrist would get frustrated because this patient needed this treatment and PCVRS would not supply it. This was really frustrating in a lot of instances, because some of the veterans needed help right away and, as a lot of the other witnesses mentioned, it would take some time.

Also during my training, I would get the managers to give me lists and charts of clients who were difficult. They would deem them difficult to deal with and they wanted me to review their charts. A lot of the time, they weren't being difficult. They were just wondering why they weren't getting their treatments or the services they were provided in the past.

While doing the training, I also experienced working with a lot of the other interdisciplinary professions that I worked beside. They weren't familiar with mental health or the mental health continuum of care. Again, a lot of the time, they didn't understand best practices.

Here's a direct patient incident: I had a client, a young female, who had been diagnosed with PTSD and had also experienced a sexual assault during her service. I reviewed her chart with the manager and the director and saw in her assessments from the OSI clinic that she was dealing with agoraphobia. She didn't want to leave her house. It was really difficult for her to come in to even talk to a psychologist without experiencing severe anxiety or some thoughts of self-harm.

This was frustrating, because it breached my principles of practice as a psychiatric nurse for non-maleficence. I didn't want to cause any harm. I advised my manager and the director that this was harmful and that I could not complete some of these assessments and continue working for PCVRS—

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Thank you very much, all of you.

As I said to all of you, I am the gatekeeper, and I apologize for interrupting any of your presentations. I am sure that the members of Parliament will ask you questions as we go forward.

We will start our first round of questions.

For six minutes, we have Mrs. Wagantall.

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

Thank you very much, Chair. I appreciate that.

I appreciate the testimony we're hearing today and I am grateful for each of you being here. This is obviously a large organization with a lot of moving parts, and there are a lot of different perspectives. It's important that we hear them all, and I want to thank you.

I will start, first of all, with Mr. Parsons. What I'm hearing is disconcerting, and I can tell that it's uncomfortable for you as well. I hope you're able to answer my questions without a lot of duress.

You spoke specifically about concerns around the fact that what was being requested of you breached your code of ethics. That pretty well hits right at home. I'm sure it was difficult to have to make the decision that you did. Do you want to elaborate a bit more on that?

[Michael Parsons]

Sure. I apologize. Yes, it hit a chord. It always hits a chord.

My biggest issue with PCVRS and working for them, on that point of breaching my code of ethics, is that I have worked for a few organizations, which I just mentioned, including Correctional Service Canada. They have service standards. AHS has service standards. At PCVRS, during all of my training, there was no mention of service standards, accreditation or keeping that accreditation.

I also witnessed that there was no oversight. There was nobody to voice my concerns to, other than the director or the manager directly in charge of my services—that was frustrating—whereas working for other government organizations or agencies, especially in a public service sense.... At AHS, if I had an issue, I'd go to the patient advocate's office or the mental health advocate's office. I didn't have that option. Even as a veteran, post-working for PCVRS, I was told to go and talk to my ombudsman or an MD.

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

Thank you very much for sharing that.

We have heard a few things. One was that when an individual went in for this assessment, it was being shared extensively within the organization without them seeing what their assessment had been and what the expectations were. Within your field, is that a normal thing to do?

This individual pushed until he saw it, but he found out it had already been shared. There were things in there that.... Because he was so concerned that he wouldn't qualify for his IRB, which was a bit of a threat, he really shared, and he was quite discouraged by the fact that information about family members and whatnot was out there.

What was your experience in that regard?

[Michael Parsons]

I never dealt with that individual directly.

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

No. I'm asking about how that assessment process is done.

[Michael Parsons]

It depends on who did the assessment. That was another thing I witnessed. With the young lady I made reference to, the assessment was originally done by an OSI clinic. It was well written. I read the assessment. Probably for this gentleman, as well, if I were to read his assessment.... Even if it was done correctly, better than I've ever seen before, working for AHS.... I worked at the Centennial Centre. We worked collaboratively. We trusted each other. We believed in our assessments.

When I presented that to my lead or my manager, or even one of the directors I constantly had conversations with, it wasn't done by one of their people from their Lifemark network, so they would try to convince me to get the veteran to do it somewhere else. That breached my principles of practice. Reading those assessments, it would have harmed the individual in so many ways, and I couldn't force myself to do that and get somebody to relive it again. I wouldn't do that even in an in-patient scenario.

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

Thank you.

One thing we have learned is that a number of individuals were having good care and were satisfied with what they were receiving, but because of this huge transition within the department, they had no choice but to transition and go through this new lane, which caused a great deal of angst for a number of them and, of course, has been a hugely expensive process.

Did you find that yourself? Did you hear them say, “I have someone who I'm really happy with and I really wish I could go back there”?

[Michael Parsons]

Yes, I agree 100%. There are a lot of clients who I wish I could go back and advocate more for, but at the same time, I took on this role of trying to cut back after being a nurse and working during COVID. I took this job to ease my workload, only to find out that this company was harming veterans. I wish I could go back and do more, but at the same time, as mental health professionals, we have to protect our own.

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

I understand.

I have very little time left. I just want to thank you for having made the decision to come today and to share what you have shared with us.

[The Chair, Liberal, Marie-France Lalonde]

Thank you very much.

For six minutes, go ahead, Mr. Casey.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Parsons, thank you for your service, sir.

I'm going to start with Dr. Sherry.

Dr. Sherry, you gave a fairly positive view of your experience with PCVRS. Were you involved in the delivery of rehabilitation benefits to veterans before the contract was transferred over to PCVRS?

[Dr. Simon Sherry]

Yes, we would have been collaborating with Veterans Affairs Canada.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

Can you explain the most significant differences between then and now?

[Dr. Simon Sherry]

I think there are commonalities, in that the PCVRS side and the VAC side both care deeply about veterans. The biggest difference I now see is that PCVRS drives action, and we're able to provide more timely services.

[Sean Casey, Liberal, Charlottetown, PE]

You just heard Mr. Parsons' testimony. I'm going to invite you to respond to some of the things he heard, but before I do, just for context, I think you indicated that CRUX is the largest provider of psychological services within the PCVRS network in Atlantic Canada. Did I get that right?

[Dr. Simon Sherry]

Yes.