Listening to earlier testimony on this study, it became pretty apparent to me that there is a knowledge gap in what is said and what is expressed within the veteran community. On our own, we don't put it out there. We keep it all to ourselves.
In order to address that, I went online. I ran a query and analyzed the results. There were 1,600 comments and 77 posts. A supermajority of them were negative, even the ones in which someone was organically saying, “I'm asking for help.” When you start going through them, at the end of the appeal, people say, “This is bullshit. How can this be happening? Is anybody else going through this?”
There are dozens and hundreds of comments saying, “Yes, me too. Yes, that's exactly what happened to me. Strap in; it's going to get worse.” That's one of the comments I received years ago when I was going through this process. I was at the end of the rope, and I reached out on social media, asking for help. One comment I got was, “Strap in; it's going to get worse.”
For the social media analysis, these are the sentiments of the veteran community. I've included a lot of the public facing comments, but not one of the private group comments.
The other document—this one was obtained through ATIP—is a four-year period of complaints VAC said it did not receive. It tracks in the dossier email after email discussing, at length, the comments VAC said didn't exist.