Veterans Affairs committee  Mr. Chair, thank you. I only want to say that when those body bags come back, or when our veterans come back injured, that we treat them and their families with dignity and respect...and that they don't have to fight again to live decently as an injured veteran in our country.

Veterans Affairs committee  Allow me to use a few English terms.

Veterans Affairs committee  I have it here. In 1993, members of the forces were not allowed to join the public service because, as it was called, it was a “khaki parachute”, and the priorities at the time were to hire women and visible minorities. The military were coming in too qualified to do the jobs,

Veterans Affairs committee  I've served with the reserves as a captain helping units, I've served as a lieutenant-colonel at area headquarters, and I commanded the whole province of Quebec, which had all the reserve forces of that province in it. Then, as deputy commander of the army, of course I had all th

Veterans Affairs committee  You can simply cut and paste to get the words, if I may suggest that—and not flippantly—the words are there. I did not throw out the point that if you deploy the individual you deploy their families without considering its impact, remembering that historically we had the concep

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you very much. In fact, in the Neary report we use the term “social covenant”, remembering that this was not just some sort of fly-by-night thing; that this was feeding continuously the DM and ADMs on the reforms that we thought were required. But much of it got overtaken

Veterans Affairs committee  It's a very interesting point, because the smell that came out of this was...we just built an insurance policy program based on SISIP. SISIP was a peacetime tool to take care of troops when they injured themselves essentially in training. That's why we brought it in. To build a

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes. I think the terminology could certainly be something, but I would strongly recommend that the nature of the beast and why it needs reform is you have to change its philosophical framework in not only the covenant, but get it out of being workmen's compensation and make it

Veterans Affairs committee  First of all, the injury happens when they're still serving. Once they're injured and are declared to be veterans because they've served at least one year, then they get a file from Veterans Affairs. So coming back a bit for a second, the reason I talked about one ministry is th

Veterans Affairs committee  In fact, I could give you the Neary report here, and that's the shortened version of it. We went into it because there were requirements that were changing. The requirements of the Pension Act were reflecting our NATO status of essentially a peacetime military versus a military t

Veterans Affairs committee  Sorry.

Veterans Affairs committee  All the three points you've raised there are points that are internal to DND. They were looking at how to reach the troops, the families, and meet their requirements, and so on. So DND in itself is a very paternalistic outfit, we know that. That's how we build our loyalty and o

Veterans Affairs committee  I'm not talking about moving anybody, I'm just talking about does it make sense to hand off somebody who really is still intrinsically part of another organization, even though the uniform's not there?

Veterans Affairs committee  They have their budget and they can protect that. There are all kinds of means. Having been an ADM myself, you can work those details out. But the handover and the whole sense of being put into a scenario where now you have to start begging or asking and God knows what other mean

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, the terms are very similar. This helps guide parliamentarians, as it eliminates the debate to determine whether we are responsible and whether something should be done or not. Facts need to be faced: the individual was deployed, affected, injured or killed. They put their l