Veterans Affairs

This House of Commons Veterans Affairs committee meeting studied veteran suicide prevention and mental health supports. The witnesses were Noémie Veilleux, a sexologist and policy consultant; Jessica Ruth, widow of an RCMP officer; Judith Hills, a serving CAF member who lost her son to suicide; and Robert Olson and SM Sansouci from the Canadian Mental Health Association.

Noémie Veilleux testified that sexual violence in the Canadian Armed Forces is pervasive and normalized, with one in three women affected, and that a culture of silence prevents reporting and amplifies trauma. She argued that current mental health policies are strong in theory but fail in deployment, with professionals lacking trauma-informed training and interprofessional collaboration being poor. She recommended recognizing sexual violence as a determinant of mental health, improving peer support systems modelled on the U.K., and moving toward people-first rather than process-first policies.

Jessica Ruth described her husband Lee's long struggle with PTSD and his eventual suicide, highlighting that families lose access to counselling after a veteran's death because benefits are tied to the veteran. She noted that Veterans Affairs case managers lacked a database of local resources, forcing veterans to find help on their own, and that Lee was initially denied a clinical care manager despite being 100% disabled. She recommended that families receive mental health benefits in their own right, that case managers be more proactive in connecting veterans to resources, and that veterans have direct phone access to their case managers.

Judith Hills testified that her son Sam died by suicide after being prescribed Prozac, Wellbutrin and the antipsychotic Latuda simultaneously, a combination a pharmacist later told her was unsafe without hospital observation. She said Sam was harassed by a warrant officer, but the board of inquiry redacted harassment allegations and did not investigate the medications, and the military refused to reopen the case. She urged the committee to address the stigma around seeking mental health care in the military, noting that many of the best soldiers she knows are being medically released for using mental health services.

Robert Olson testified that Canada is one of the few industrialized nations without a national suicide prevention strategy, and that universal approaches alone insufficiently serve priority populations like veterans. He recommended developing a pan-Canadian strategy with federal-provincial-territorial collaboration, dedicated funding, clear deliverables and outcome targets, and strengthening peer support programs such as CMHA's OSI-CAN. He agreed with earlier testimony that gaps remain in the CAF/VAC joint suicide prevention strategy and that more granular data on suicide deaths by occupation and ethnicity is needed.

SM Sansouci declined to comment on the culture of silence in the military, stating that CMHA is not directly linked to the Canadian Armed Forces or Veterans Affairs.

The committee did not engage in procedural debate, motions or votes during this meeting.