Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you, Jerry. My two closing remarks would be this. First, you are Canadians for veterans. I'm very aware of that, and we really don't care who fixes it, but there are some significant issues that need to be dealt with and in a post-modern, advanced, brilliant country, as this one is, surely we can get it right.

Veterans Affairs committee  I'm digging into my memory, but it seems to me that there were a number of studies that tracked marital disruption among military and non-military. I think those studies or surveys have been done. On a personal level, I don't know the difference, but I would suspect you would find they're probably reasonably comparable, but maybe not.

Veterans Affairs committee  The one that immediately comes to mind is your point about accessibility, so that partners have access to the services they would be entitled to as a family. One of the things a friend of mine is going through is that he's receiving, I think, a week-long retreat by Warriors Canada to deal with an occupational stress injury, and his spouse is involved in that.

Veterans Affairs committee  That would probably be left in the best interests of the person disclosing. One would have to ask what the benefit is to disclose this to the public. There may be some benefits for that individual to have their story well known and publicized, or it may violate the sense of privacy of that individual, and they would prefer to discuss it with someone who's been there to get that camaraderie and sense of understanding.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's a valid point. I ran the chaplain school, so I'm very familiar with how to treat PTSD and how to train chaplains to work with people dealing with personal issues that may require expertise or medical intervention and so on. We teach our chaplains how to work with that individual without compromising the therapeutic or the pastoral relationship between the chaplain and the individual, yet building on that pastoral relationship to encourage that individual to self-disclose.

Veterans Affairs committee  For me, because I don't have any ongoing health issues as a result of my service, I'm not a beneficiary of Veterans Affairs. I'm not entitled to it and I don't need it. On the other hand, on a personal level, there are significant difficulties in moving from a uniformed, structured system into a system that is not structured and has the ambiguities of civilian life, which I didn't experience when I was in uniform.

Veterans Affairs committee  Absolutely. One of the main strengths of the Canadian Forces chaplaincy is we that don't keep notes. We don't write reports on conversations we have. The level of confidentiality is significant within the legal bounds of confidentiality and counselling. Regardless of rank, chaplains would move freely and become the sounding board for trauma, personal difficulties, marital disruptions, moral dilemmas, anger, and for distress with commanding officers or a superior or frustration with subordinates.

Veterans Affairs committee  Let me answer that with this analogy. If you have one member who's ill with post-traumatic stress disorder and living in a family of four, you're treating one-quarter of the problem if you're not dealing with the rest of the family members. The nature of mental health issues is systemic, and the whole system is involved.

Veterans Affairs committee  You're absolutely right. My wife takes great umbrage at the fact that that in order to access my file, she has to go through me. It puts her in a position where she's accessing her future through her partner. In today's society, that almost puts the spouse in the position for which we used to use the phrase, “dependants, furniture, and effects”.

Veterans Affairs committee  If I may, Mr. Chairman, I'd like to defer that question to Jerry because Jerry was working on Saturday looking for homeless veterans in Ottawa, so he's further ahead on that issue than I am. Before I do that, one of the things we discovered when we were trying to set up the occupational stress injury clinics across Canada within the military was that—just to underscore your concern about the lost expertise, should we close those beds and lose that staff—when we were looking for suitable civilian facilities to treat our veterans or to treat military members with post-traumatic stress disorder and other occupational stress injuries, it was very difficult.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes. I think one of the things that needs to happen over a period of time is some kind of review process be taken regularly as to: are we meeting the needs of today's veterans in their current situation? God forbid if we end up putting more soldiers in harm's way, and we end up with a different kind of veteran, as we saw with the Afghan veteran and so on, because it was a different kind of war, a different kind of conflict, creating different kinds of issues for us.

Veterans Affairs committee  I would agree and you're right. As this population ages, there's going to be a point where the pressure that they're going to put on public health services will be significant. I'm not convinced and haven't seen strong evidence that the public service medical care really comprehends—especially if you're dealing with trauma, long-term trauma, psychological as well as physiological issues—how to deal with these people, so they end up falling through the cracks.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, I would agree with the ombudsman. The short answer is absolutely. One of the things that we discovered in health care when I was working with the surgeon general's office, one of the things that became very clear, was that there is a tremendous dissatisfaction of members because they would come in and they'd see Doc Blue on one day, and then come a few weeks later with the same complaint and have to go through the whole process again with a different doctor, and then a third doctor.

Veterans Affairs committee  One of the things I've run across is accessibility; our seniors have trouble accessing services and benefits through Internet services. Picking up a phone and having a live person at the other end is probably the only alternative for that class and age bracket. A number of people complain they can't work their way through it.

Veterans Affairs committee  On the compensation package, I think the numbers are indicating that there are financial compensations that are less than one would get under workmen's compensation, for example, if one were injured in the same way. I don't have those specific numbers in my head, but I became aware of some of that.