Proceedings of the Subcommittee on
Veterans Affairs
Issue 7 - Evidence - October 8, 2014
OTTAWA, Wednesday, October 8, 2014
The Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs of the Standing Senate Committee on National Security and Defence met this day at 12:04 p.m., to continue its study on the medical, social, and operational impacts of mental health issues affecting serving and retired members of the Canadian Armed Forces, including operational stress injuries (OSIs) such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Senator Joseph A. Day (Chair) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Chair: Honourable senators, today we are continuing our study on operational stress injuries and other mental health issues affecting veterans.
[English]
As part of our study on operational stress injuries, sometimes referred to as OSI, such as post-traumatic stress disorder — also the acronym PTSD, which is quite often used — and other mental health conditions of Canada's veterans, we will be hearing today from Bronwen Evans, managing director of a very successful fundraising organization to support military personnel and their families, which Ms. Evans will tell us more about in her presentation.
We are hearing a lot about the very good work that you're doing with True Patriot Love and we're very pleased to welcome you here today. I understand you have introductory remarks, and then honourable senators may well wish to engage in a question-and-answer with you.
Bronwen Evans, Managing Director, True Patriot Love: It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you all for taking an interest in this topic that's obviously very close to my heart. I've been involved with this organization since day one.
I've provided a deck that will give you a bit of background on TPL, our mission and our vision. I won't go through that in detail right now, but I will say that we've been around for about six years now and raised in the range of $20 million. We don't run programs, per se, as an organization. We raise funds that we disburse to other grassroots charities that are in a better position and that are experts at running programs. That's not something that we do, but our focus is on raising funds and disbursing money to those charities.
The areas that we focus on, in addition to mental health and rehabilitation, are physical health and rehabilitation. We fund, for example, home and vehicle retrofits for soldiers who have been injured and who might be missing limbs. We fund programs like adaptive ski programs so that they can take up old pastimes or in some cases new pastimes and derive some meaning and value from that.
We also generally fund across a board what we call ''family supports,'' which range from tutoring for children who are part of military families, because when they move from base to base they often fall behind in school. We also provide funding for military families with children with special needs. I don't know if you are aware, but one of the issues is that if a family, for example, has a child with autism and they're getting public supports in Alberta and they move to a base in Ontario, they go to the bottom of the waiting list in Ontario. The chances of their moving again are higher than actually receiving the supports before they leave. Many families have to take out second mortgages on their home to pay for supports. Oftentimes, therapy needs to be timely so that if they don't provide, say, speech therapy at a certain age, there is no point in providing it at all. We spend about half a million dollars a year in that area to support those families, and other things like emergency child care.
You asked specifically for me to speak to programs that are out there that aren't funded by government, and so I thought I would touch on a few programs that we, as an organization, have been funding over the years. In many cases, these have been multi-year partnerships, and we feel good about the programs and the outcomes they're having. Much of the information we get back is more on the anecdotal side from veterans who provide testimonials to say this really made a difference. That's important too.
One of my points here is that if you look at the programs typically funded by government, they are more the traditional evidence-based programs — for example, psychiatric or counselling with a psychologist — as opposed to the more non-conventional types of treatments that demonstrate good outcomes but probably haven't had the same type of scientific rigour as the more traditional ones. The point there is that oftentimes one size doesn't fit all for people suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. We are funding things that government typically doesn't.
One of those programs is the Outward Bound Veterans program. You may be familiar with it; I have provided a description in here. We fund the entirety of the veterans program for Outward Bound, so without our funding the program wouldn't exist. We have come into contact with a number of veterans, before and after, who have gone through this program. The wonderful thing about this program is that it's great for veterans who may be experiencing mental health issues but aren't quite at a place where they're ready to access community supports, whether it's a psychiatrist or psychologist or Alcoholics Anonymous.
They go through this program that's about being in the outdoors with peers, and it's an opportunity for them to meet with like-minded peers to talk about some of the things they may be experiencing in common. From there, once they start to normalize a little bit of what they're going through, they feel more comfortable, when they're done the program, reaching out into the community and accessing supports. Outward Bound helps them through that process.
We have had tremendous feedback on this program. In fact, some of the participants have been part of our expeditions to the Himalayas and North Pole; so we know them quite well, and it is truly a terrific program. It's funded 100 per cent through charitable dollars; there is no government funding.
The Veterans Transition Program is another program that we have funded over the last three years. It was developed out of the University of British Columbia. It's a peer-to-peer support program, but it is medically supervised. Compared to the Outward Bound Veterans program, which isn't medically supervised, a little more traditional therapy is part of this program. They have been looking at the results in a more traditional, rigorous way.
Some really great things are coming out of that. We have funded various programs now across the country so they have been able to expand beyond British Columbia. We have funded programs in Atlantic Canada, Ontario and Quebec.
I think they are now receiving some funding from Veterans Affairs. I think the way it's working is that if you are officially a client — so you have filled out the paperwork and they recognize you need support — Veterans Affairs is paying for those participants. We are paying for the participants who aren't technically clients of Veterans Affairs, if that makes sense.
Another program we fund is called The Prince's Operation Entrepreneur. This is a program out of Memorial University. The simplest way of putting it is it's like an accelerated MBA course for veterans who are interested in starting up their own business. Our funding goes towards soldiers suffering from mental health issues, like PTSD, so we fund those individuals to go through this.
As you know, there are many challenges associated with veteran transition. We worked on a report for the Minister of Veterans Affairs, which we will be presenting to him shortly, that looks at the systemic challenges that prevents veterans from making a transition from military to meaningful civilian employment. I say ''meaningful'' in the sense that what often happens is that veterans who come out of the military end up with jobs that aren't truly reflective of their skills. So that's a big piece we were looking at.
One of the barriers we found was mental health. If soldiers were dealing with a mental health issue, that was often a barrier for them to gaining meaningful employment.
The Prince's Operation Entrepreneur program helps individuals like these start their own businesses. They are taught by professors and they receive mentorship. For somebody dealing with a mental illness, often having your own business can be helpful in the sense that you are in charge of your own schedule and have some flexibility. That's a program we have been funding for three years.
One of our most recent partnerships is with the University of Southern California. I don't know if you're familiar with their virtual reality treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, but the idea is to expose soldiers to the trauma in a controlled setting. Through constant re-exposure, they become desensitized to it, and it's a therapy that's proven to be quite effective.
The University of Southern California, working with the U.S. Army, developed a virtual reality treatment that includes sights, sound and smell. It has proven to be quite effective in the U.S.
The Department of National Defence tried to use the treatment, as it was developed in the U.S., on Canadian soldiers. The challenge was that it wasn't as effective as they had hoped because it was Americanized in the sense that it was American vehicles and uniforms, so it didn't seem all that authentic to the soldiers.
We are funding this over the next two or three months. We have given some money to the University of Southern California to Canadianize the technology so that it does truly represent the Canadian experience in Afghanistan, with the right uniforms and vehicles. Once it has been Canadianized, the Department of National Defence will be able to license the technology to use around the country in their clinics for treating soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder.
It's one of those things that probably the government would have funded eventually, but we made the decision to go ahead and do it ourselves because the government would likely have had to have gone through a lengthy RFP process. From speaking to the experts in health services, we knew that the University of Southern California, with all the work they had done, they probably would have won a government RFP at the end of the day. In our minds, if we can get it into the hands of clinicians sooner and prevent that many more suicides, let's just get this done. So we've moved forward with that.
Those are the major programs we have funded in terms of dollars and multi-year partnerships.
We also fund a variety of community-based programs, primarily through the Military Family Resource Centres, which exist on each of the bases across the country. On the last page, I've outlined some of the programs that we have funded.
Many of them extend to the family. While DND offers a number of supports or traditional therapy for the serving member, when it comes to the family, they receive their health care; so anything covered by the provincial health care system they receive through the province. They're in that system as opposed to being on more the fast-track system federally.
We find there is a huge need for supports and counselling for spouses and for children who have a parent with an operational stress injury like post-traumatic stress disorder. We fund a number of programs in the area of suicide prevention and educating families about the signs of both post-traumatic stress disorder and somebody who may be suicidal.
We are working on funding more programs related to children and mental health in the military. This has been somewhat of a challenge. We have found that there are different programs scattered all over the country, primarily through the MFRCs, but there's no real research as far as we can tell being done to figure out what are best practices around those programs. We're hoping to bring together a group of experts around that over the next few months to talk that through.
We don't want to reinvent the wheel. If there's a program we can borrow, whether it's from CAMH or the ROH or perhaps even a program that a current MFRC is running, how can we draw from that, bring people together and figure out how to fund that across the country?
We also have recently announced funding for Paws Fur Thought. It's an organization that trains service dogs to help soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. As I mentioned, one size does not fit all. That's likely not a solution for everybody suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but when you talk to those veterans who have benefited from a service dog, there is no question that it has made a huge difference in their lives — the difference between being shut in your house and being able to go out in public, which is obviously also freeing for the spouse and means a different quality of life and experiences for the family as a whole.
In terms of the challenges and gaps that we see, one of the things we hear over and over again is that even though the Department of National Defence and the Military Family Resource Centres might offer excellent programs for treating mental health issues, for the soldiers there's a stigma associated with accessing those, whether it's through the MFRC or through traditional government programs. Even for a family member, for a spouse to go into an MFRC and say, ''You know what, we're having some challenges at home and I think my husband or wife might be suffering from PTSD,'' they feel in a sense that they're telling on them and it could somehow compromise their job within the military. That is an issue, and I think that speaks to the need to continue to have services and programs that are funded outside of government that people can access.
We also hear that reservists, because they don't live on base, aren't aware of the programs that might be available to them. Last week we had a symposium in Ottawa, which Senator Day attended. A couple spoke at it. The husband, a reservist, had served in Afghanistan, came back and had fairly severe post-traumatic stress disorder. The wife didn't come from a military background. Other than the fact that her husband joined his regiment every Tuesday for training, that was all she knew about the military. They had no idea where to turn or what was available to them.
When you live on base or you are part of the regular forces, information about the programs out there tends to be communicated to you more than it does if you are in the reserves. I don't know so much that it's a question of there not being enough programs to help reservists in terms of mental health supports. I think it may be more of an issue of communication and letting them know what is in fact out there. I think the military really struggles with the proper infrastructure to set up to disseminate that information.
Another area that we notice there are challenges is the handoff from DND to Veterans Affairs. Once you release from the military, you are now essentially a client of Veterans Affairs. The CF and the Department of National Defence are no longer responsible for providing you with any sort of mental health supports that you might need. We understand from veterans that the process of becoming an actual client for Veterans Affairs is quite cumbersome, with a lot of paperwork to fill out.
On top of that, in many cases post-traumatic stress disorder doesn't show up until years later. If you release from the Department of National Defence, you might think everything is fine. You might not think, ''You know what, I need to sign myself over with Veterans Affairs for support,'' and then it's years down the road where your issues are appearing and you don't know where to turn.
The last thing I want to mention, and I guess it's a gap, but as I said, one size does not fit all. Given the stigma for soldiers to go to government for support, for veterans to go to government for support, it may be that we need to think of programs beyond government, which are many of the programs that we fund, and recognize that it's important that they're in fact out there.
I think that's about it.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms. Evans. We'll have the slide deck that you presented translated and circulated to all members of the committee. It will form part of our record. We thank you for bringing that along.
We also have a research document drafted by the Library of Parliament that gives us some background, and that's in both official languages and has been circulated. They are the documents that honourable senators have had an opportunity to look at.
We will now start with questions. Senator Stewart Olsen is from New Brunswick and is the deputy chair of this subcommittee.
Senator Stewart Olsen: Thank you very much for your presentation. It was very informative and sets a clear path forward, to my way of thinking, which is, I really like to concentrate on what we can do moving forward to help.
Have you noticed a change in the public's attitude and awareness of the problem of PTSD in recent years, or do you think more work needs to be done in that aspect?
Ms. Evans: Generally, there is a lot more awareness and I'd like to think a stigma reduction in terms of mental health, and I think that's due in part to campaigns like the Bell Let's Talk campaign. There's more awareness in the sense that we have completed our mission to Afghanistan and so people are now talking about the after-effects of that, so post-traumatic stress disorder is coming up a lot more now than it had in previous years.
We also do quite a bit of work on the employment support side for soldiers who are trying to make the transition. One of the challenges you hear is that there is a bit of reluctance by employers, many thinking that if somebody has served over in Afghanistan and witnessed terrible things, that they have post-traumatic stress disorder or a mental condition that might make them unfit for a corporate work environment. There is still quite a bit of work to be done there.
Senator Stewart Olsen: I notice you refer a lot to Afghan vets. In my discussions with veterans, I notice that a lot of our Bosnian veterans and those from other theatres were severely affected. Some of them are just now seeking treatment because it was not recognized or they didn't have an ease dealing with it. Do you have clients, people that you support from those areas?
Ms. Evans: Definitely. In fact, one of the organizations that we are working on providing funds to is St. Anne's Hospital. It's in Montreal and they are a VAC facility, but the clients they serve are primarily from the Korean War and Bosnia. They are actually the only hospital in Canada that provides a residential program for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
I probably shouldn't have limited it to Afghanistan veterans; we don't make that distinction.
The funding that we do through the Military Family Resource Centres is primarily geared to veterans or serving members who are in Afghanistan, because it is still serving members we are funding there.
Senator Stewart Olsen: I have been working a lot with veterans who are very hesitant about accessing treatments in the service centres as it has been changed to Service Canada centres from Veterans Affairs Canada. Something I'm looking into now is our veterans' hospitals — there is a hospital in Moncton, New Brunswick — and I think we should be using some of their facilities as clinics rather than perhaps Service Canada. I think it would be a lot easier on people, and for peer support. Are you hearing anything about that in your work? It's where to access the treatment, and once again we're dealing with the stigma of the words ''mental illness.''
Ms. Evans: As I was saying, do think it's important to have supports for veterans that are embedded more in the community. Part of that — I know the Vanier Institute is doing quite a bit of work on this — is about educating family doctors. It's about educating guidance counsellors at school who might not be familiar with the signs of post-traumatic stress disorder or the anxieties and stressors related to a military lifestyle. I think there is a big awareness and education piece that needs to happen.
We talk about the fact that at one point children from military families would typically go to schools where 80 per cent of the children were from military families. That's no longer the case. There are good and bad things about that, but one of the bad things is they don't have the same kind of peer support. Also, the teachers, guidance counsellors and principals aren't educated on some of the stressors that might be associated with it. So I think it's important to have more supports through the community that recognize some of the challenges out there.
Senator Stewart Olsen: Thank you. It's very informative.
Senator White: Thank you very much for being here today. I have two questions, one short, one long.
I know that a number of people have looked at survivorship when it comes to illness, mental illness and cancer as well, which has been very successful, in particular, with coaching and advocates. In fact, here in Ottawa we have a cancer survivorship centre that focuses strictly on coaching people through the illness of cancer. I know there is some of that in the military. Has your organization been involved in development or research around the success of coaching and advocacy for mental illness and in particular with the military?
Ms. Evans: You mean coaching by somebody who has or had post-traumatic stress disorder and survived it?
Senator White: Let's say I come back from Afghanistan and identify that I have a challenge. Figuring out the system, particularly if we expect the bureaucracy to explain it, means they're explaining it to 1,000 people and they represent none of them, or they represent all of them. Either way it's almost as bad. It's important to have somebody that you deal with, either volunteer or employed, who is specifically your advocate to help you walk through the system of mental illness, the specifics around post-traumatic stress disorder, your challenges.
Ms. Evans: There is a charity that does just that. It was started by an individual who had fairly severe PTSD. I will get the name in a moment. They do almost exactly that. They have a network of volunteers around the country who are tapped into the local community, in terms of knowing the supports that are out there. People come in through the website. It's web-based. Chris Dupree is individual who started that organization.
Senator White: But there is nothing substantial within the government or organizations you're connected to that are providing that type of support.
Ms. Evans: One of the organizations we support is the Military Families Fund, which is a charity run out of the Department of National Defence. They find that they need somebody there to coordinate supports for individuals, to be their advocates in a sense. They came to us for funding for a full-time employee for each of the MFRCs to perform that kind of function. We're not sure that paying a full-time person at each of those is the most effective use of resources and there might be a better way of doing that.
I think the need has been identified. It's a question of how to provide something that's affordable, scalable, that can help as many people as possible.
Senator White: The second part is that my background has allowed me to see both proactive and reactive response to PTSD. I refer to proactive as engaging staff to make sure they understand that it's going to come for many of you or people around you, looking for the precursors, identifying the need before it happens and even helping them identify possible situations that may place them in jeopardy before they get in jeopardy.
Have you done any work around the proactive piece? By the way, I was on your website and it's great to see the work you're doing, but has your work been reactive in trying to make people healthy rather than trying to stop it in the first place?
Ms. Evans: Many of the community-based programs we fund are proactive in the sense that we provide funding, whether it's staff at MFRCs or family members to be educated on the signs of mental illness. It's proactive in the sense that hopefully they're catching it and doing something about it before it gets too severe. We do fund a number of programs in that area.
The government funds a resiliency-based program that all soldiers go through before they're deployed. Whether or not it truly prepares them for their experience when they're over there is another question, and whether you can truly prepare somebody for that anyway, I don't know. I think about our soldier team captain from our North Pole expedition. He wrote his doctoral thesis on this. He said that we're very good on the training aspect in terms of the physical training, but there is still so much more that needs to be done to prepare soldiers mentally for what they're about to go in and see.
Senator White: Psychological tool-building.
Ms. Evans: Yes, and there is some work the government does and there are some programs they do, but as an organization, we haven't been involved in funding any of those sort of pre-deployment programs.
Senator White: Thank you. Again, congratulations on the work you're doing.
Senator Mitchell: Thanks very much, Ms. Evans. This is very interesting and your organization does wonderful work.
I'm wondering about the question of funding. You clearly do some things that one might expect the government wouldn't do — perhaps the Outward Bound Veterans program is an example — although you might argue that they should do everything they can do. It seems to me that you also fund programs that the government should do.
First, do you get money from the government, and, second, do you think government should be putting more money into this themselves, or is that somewhere you want to go?
Ms. Evans: Which programs? Do you have particular programs —
Senator Mitchell: I think you mentioned that you support psychiatry and psychological services.
Ms. Evans: Sorry, no, we wouldn't provide funding for those things. If a soldier or family member is seeing a psychologist or a psychiatrist, that's covered by OHIP. We wouldn't be funding those costs. We don't fund anything that's covered by the public health care system.
Senator Mitchell: Are there things that you're funding that you think should more appropriately be funded by Veterans Affairs or by the military?
Ms. Evans: That's a difficult question. And you asked whether we get any government funding, and the answer is no, we don't get any government funding.
It's a question that we've thought a lot about as an organization. If we go back to why we originally established True Patriot Love, it was to build the bridge between the civilian world and the military world. Many people have never met somebody in uniform. If you live in Toronto, like I do, you never see anybody in uniform in Toronto; it's so far removed from our everyday lives. Really, all people knew about soldiers in Afghanistan was what they read in the news.
We wanted to remind people of the sacrifices that not only the soldiers were making, but that their families were making, and also create the bridge. We felt that people have a duty to support them in some way. As part of that, we recognize that if government were doing everything, then you wouldn't be creating that connection between the military world and the civilian world, which we feel is very important.
The answer is that government can always do more. The government can look at all areas, whether it's health care in general, education, or what have you.
As an organization, we have chosen not to focus our time on lobbying government, which can sometimes be a very frustrating thing to do, and focus more on how we can help and how we can supplement what's already out there.
Senator Mitchell: That's great.
You mentioned stigma, and it's something that I think occurs in the RCMP as well. You said that many families, and certainly military personnel themselves, are afraid to go to the military or even to family resource centres and say they have a problem because of this stigma.
Is it a perception that there's a stigma, or are they in fact disadvantaged in that organization if they declare they have a problem? That would bring me to another point that, therefore, services outside that structure are, of course, of great worth, which is a point you're making, and maybe they need to be funded.
Ms. Evans: There's no doubt that there is still a lot of stigma around mental health, whether it's in the military or outside the military. It's amplified in the military, because there is an expectation that you're strong — it's part of your job and that's why you're doing what you're doing. Compare that to working at a bank and developing a mental illness, you haven't ''failed at your job'' would be the perception.
This is one of the barriers, and I don't know there is necessarily anything that can be done about this: If you're suffering from mental health issues and you access a service — for example, if a serving member accesses therapy through the military — the psychiatrist or doctor is obligated to let the military know if they think you're not fit to serve. So if you're coming at it from an individual's perspective, you might wonder if that is a subjective decision. You don't know. That might be a barrier. It is maybe ''less stigma and more reality.''
Similarly for military families, there is a sense that they pride themselves on being resilient because they are. So to say, ''I'm having a really tough time,'' it's contrary to feeling like ''I'm part of this and I'm supposed to be serving my country, and now I'm saying I can't handle it,'' or ''It looks like I'm telling on my spouse.'' So, yes, I think the stigma is amplified there, which is why it's important to have resources outside the military.
Senator Frum: I will follow up on what Senator Mitchell was asking. I'm proud to have been involved in the first True Patriot Love gala in Toronto in 2009. I remember being approached to be involved and I asked the same question: Why is private money necessary? Shouldn't the government take responsibility for this? The answer given to me that convinced me and helped me go out to convince others to offer support is that the needs are great and that, while it requires government, private contributions are required as well because you can't possibly ever do enough for our men and women in the military. The more we can do, the better, which is how True Patriot Love helps.
I want to better understand. You already discussed this, but in terms of where you choose to spend your money or create programming, how much do you cooperate and coordinate with the Armed Forces, DND and Veterans Affairs Canada? How much of that is done in concert with coordination, and how much is done as your organization sees fit?
Ms. Evans: We work very closely with the Department of National Defence. We want to make sure that we aren't funding the things they fund, especially when we get applications from Military Family Resource Centres. They may apply for things that they should be getting funding for from government, and they just don't know that. So before we fund anything for a Military Family Resource Centre, we coordinate with the Department of National Defence so they see that.
In terms of the funding we do for mental health programs, we work really closely with Health Services. We actually run by the Chief Military Psychiatrist all of the programs we fund, who is obviously more of an expert in this area than we are. They can say, ''You know what, I know this organization; this is a good one.''
For example, we've just gone through a recent round where we got an application from an MFRC that will be looking at two different programs to fund counselling for families. He would say, ''I would pick this one for this reason.'' He said to us that for a program that offers couples counselling once a week versus just a one-time full weekend, the once-a-week thing is more effective and a better way to go.
We work really closely with the Department of National Defence. About a year ago, we set up an official memorandum of understanding with them in terms of how we would work that relationship to make sure that we were funneling all of the information through the right people and that the right people were seeing it.
The Chair: The military would be inclined to have the same program at all of the Military Family Resource Centres across the country. In the applications that come to you from individual resource centres, would you consider funding just one stand-alone entity because of the resources they have there and, maybe, the particular challenges?
Ms. Evans: It's interesting. This has been a topic of debate for quite some time between the Military Family Resource Centres and DND in terms of the services offered at the different MFRCs across the country.
DND gives the Military Family Resource Centres money to fund basic services, which they are mandated to fund, but each of the MFRCs has charitable status and its own board of directors. They are responsible for fundraising to fund programs in addition to what's funded by government.
There are a couple of challenges there. You can imagine that for some MFRCs, just because of where they're located or maybe because of the executive director or because the board members are better at fundraising than others, it creates tremendous disparity between the different Military Family Resource Centres in terms of the programs that are offered. That can be very difficult for families when they move from base to base because they don't know what to expect. They can go from a base where there were a lot of great programs to support their children or family counselling to a base that has very little of that.
There has been some discussion with the MFRCs, through the Department of National Defence, about trying to centralize them a bit more so that when a family moves from base to base, the experience and supports they get are the same.
The argument against doing that is that the needs also vary by community, so you don't want to take away an MFRC's ability to offer programs that might be specific to that community. In some cases, it might be supports. If it's an MFRC in Quebec and you need funding for second-language training, that might be something specific. When you take some of the more remote MFRCs, they will have different issues than, say, the Ottawa MFRC.
It's really been a challenge to figure out the right way to go with this. What we would like to see and are hoping to influence is that — I think I mentioned to you earlier, Senator Day — we have a great partnership with the Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research, and we're about to announce a substantial amount of funding to them. As part of that partnership, we would like them to do some evaluation of the programs that we're funding through the MFRCs, and that in turn will help us to decide the eligibility criteria for funding so that we can start instituting best practices across the country by virtue of what we fund. That's our way of addressing it.
The Chair: I'm glad to hear that the work with respect to the military and military families is being looked at and assessed. I hear from the Minister of Veterans Affairs, as well as the Ombudsman for Veterans Affairs, in particular, about the tremendous number of programs starting up in different places. The institute that you just made reference to, based at Queen's University, has 32 different institutions across Canada as part of it now, which is an indication of how this is exploding. I guess that, as a Senate committee, we have to find our role in all of this. I'm sure you're doing the same because you must be getting more and more applications from different entities asking for funding as you become better known.
Ms. Evans: We are. One of the challenges that we have right now is that certain programs wouldn't exist if they didn't have funding from us. Our goal is to increase what we're raising because, when I look at next year, the funding is all spoken for. If we pull funding from the veterans program for Outward Bound, that program wouldn't exist. The Veterans Transition Network won't be able to expand. Military Family Resource Centres will have to cut programs we've been funding. The need is much bigger than we're able to fund at the moment.
The Chair: Could you tell us about this report that you said you're about to submit to the minister? I'm assuming it's the Minister of National Defence or the Minister of Veterans Affairs.
Ms. Evans: Veterans Affairs.
The Chair: You talked about, in your terminology, ''systemic inhibitors'' to recovery.
Ms. Evans: When Minister Blaney was the Minister for Veterans Affairs, he asked us to assemble what we called the Veterans Transition Advisory Council that was made up of representatives of corporate Canada and charities like ours and also had representation from DND. Our mandate was to look at the systemic barriers that prevented the transition from military to civilian employment.
We released a draft report about a year ago. At that time, Minister Fantino became the Minister for Veterans Affairs. He asked us to take our initial recommendation and develop recommendations on how to operationalize that, and that's the report that we're about to present to him.
One of the pieces that it deals with is employment supports for the ill and the injured, and there is a program. Actually, this would be a great program for this subcommittee to look at. It's a program that's based in Edmonton called Prospect, and they have been working with the JPSU in Edmonton. This is the unit on the base that houses soldiers who aren't deemed fit to be working in the military. They may end up going back into the military after they have had counselling and different sorts of things, or they may end up transitioning to a job elsewhere. They are still receiving a paycheque from DND. The goal is to try to figure out with them what their plan is.
Prospect has been working really closely with the ill and injured population out of there and has had an employment placement rate of 85 per cent. It has been an outstanding program. We've actually just told them that we will provide them with funding to continue the program in Edmonton. Originally they had received funding from DND, but that's up now. We're going to work with them on taking that program across the country.
The Chair: Excellent. We will look into more of that.
Ms. Evans: I'm happy to give you the contact information for the executive director there.
The Chair: If that report becomes public — it may just be for the minister, initially — we'd certainly like to be on your distribution list.
Ms. Evans: Definitely. I think it will be public, yes.
Senator Stewart Olsen: I don't mean to put you on the spot, but if you had to prioritize your suggestions for community supports, what would be your top priority that we should be looking at?
Ms. Evans: Specifically related to mental health?
Senator Stewart Olsen: Yes.
Ms. Evans: If I think of the programs that have been successful by our standards, the peer-to-peer based support programs have been tremendous. We put a lot of our money into those programs. We've seen some really great results coming out of those.
I don't know if this is part of this subcommittee's mandate or not, but the other piece is the family and the recognition that PTSD affects the whole family and what we are doing to support the family. Right now government really isn't in that space in terms of funding it, so I think it's to figure out who should be and what needs to be done there.
Senator Stewart Olsen: Thank you very much.
Senator Mitchell: Do you come across military personnel who have PTSD and haven't been in combat, who get it from the job situation, from the military structure, or is it always combat?
Ms. Evans: No, it's not always. I'm thinking of somebody who we've come into contact with, and his role in the military was repatriation. He wasn't over in Afghanistan but he saw all the bodies coming back. It wasn't from combat directly.
What we see is secondary PTSD in spouses, where they are living with somebody who has served who may be violent, is having terrible nightmares that are violent and who is just different. We see secondary PTSD, and that's in children as well.
The Chair: Is there any work going on comparing what has been done for other first responders, such as firemen, policemen and other people involved in trauma situations? Maybe they have not been injured themselves but have seen terrible things and are suffering from post-traumatic stress as a result? Have you acquired any knowledge base that might have been developed there? I'm thinking of hospitals and emergency room tertiary care in the hospitals. That must be another situation where they have to learn to live with some pretty horrific things. Could we use that knowledge to help with respect to the military?
Ms. Evans: I'm sure there probably is. We haven't been involved in terms of funding any research or anything around that as far as I know. We do give money directly to CIMVHR and perhaps they have funded work in that area. I would imagine that Health Services at DND is probably tied into that bigger community, but we're not specifically doing anything in that area.
The Chair: Thank you.
Seeing no other senators who are able to stay any longer since the Senate chamber will be sitting shortly, on behalf of the Subcommittee on Veterans Affairs, part of our National Defence and Security Committee here in the Senate, we thank you very much, Ms. Evans, and we thank, through you, all those who work and volunteer for True Patriot Love and donate to True Patriot Love. You're doing some wonderful work for soldiers, veterans and families, and we thank you very much for that.
Ms. Evans: It's my pleasure.
(The committee adjourned.)