Veterans Affairs committee  I would like to quickly add that in terms of offering it virtually, during COVID, on about two days' notice, we actually had a group of women ready to go. We switched to virtual and offered the entire thing virtually, and we managed to iron out most of the kinks. It was quite remarkable.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you for the question. Do you want to start with the stats first?

Veterans Affairs committee  That information is on the website. We could submit the details. We do a lot of pre- and post-testing, as well as qualitative feedback. We have virtually no dropouts. People come and they don't leave—I mean they don't drop out.

Veterans Affairs committee  We don't let them go. We lock them down. I'm sorry. I'm getting a little punchy. We rolled in at three in the morning.

Veterans Affairs committee  We knew that was coming.

Veterans Affairs committee  Well, actually, we could. We've thought about it and talked about it, but right now we don't actually have the resources and referrals to do that. We initially were approved to have a clinic where we are located in the Okanagan, and in Vancouver and in Calgary, but given what has happened with the problems with VAC and the drop in referrals, we're kind of stuck, honestly, trying to survive in the Okanagan.

Veterans Affairs committee  Sometimes I feel as if it's the elephant in the room. I've been reviewing hours and hours of testimony, and this is.... You're talking about the outsourcing to PCVRS. We were not notified. We have referrals coast to coast. We were not notified. We didn't hear about this at all until very late in the game, probably midsummer.

Veterans Affairs committee  I would say that OSR is an umbrella term. Again, with women, and sometimes with men too, there is an aspect of MST that we address. Typically, I don't know that we.... We're very holistic in terms of how we integrate things. It's not like we have a unit on MST; it's integrated throughout the program in the individual counselling and the kinds of activities people do, such as yoga or equine therapy for trauma and that kind of thing.

Veterans Affairs committee  Do you mean moving our program or just having access to any program?

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes. It's just to elaborate a bit, because I have a number of contacts with case managers, for example, in the region where we live, and they don't even know who's who on Vancouver Island, much less from province to province. Eastern Canada seems to have no idea of what's going on in western Canada in terms of treatment programs, and we're not talking about just our program.

Veterans Affairs committee  I was just ignoring it.

Veterans Affairs committee  We've heard some of the stories, too, and we hear this all the time. Sometimes, it seems, at the end of the day, they end up with us after they've been to numerous programs and have been retraumatized. Certainly these big addiction centres are institutions for people with severe addictions.

Veterans Affairs committee  I think you're speaking to it well. I particularly wanted Adrienne to speak, because she is our director of operations, and from a business perspective, there are solutions here. There are systems that could be put in place to streamline this whole process: when people are first released from CAF, the referral to VAC, and VAC reaching out, doing an assessment and determining a care plan and the needs.

Veterans Affairs committee  Sorry; I lost my train of thought here. Essentially the point I was making is how difficult it is to navigate the bureaucracy of VAC. In particular, the veterans do not have choice in terms of their treatment program and apparently, of late, with the outsourcing of services. They have limited choice in terms of their care providers, be it psychology, psychiatry, occupational therapy, physical therapy and so on.

Veterans Affairs committee  Perhaps I'll turn it to our director of operations, Adrienne Davidson. Would you like to speak?