Thanks, Colleen.

Thank you, everyone, for allowing us to be here and share with you.

I'm going to present to you three more points.

The first one is just building on and talking further about service dogs being a personalized support and a complement treatment. Service dogs perform technical tasks for the veteran. For example, interrupting a nightmare is one form of task. In our research, we consistently hear that service dogs are a source of support in veterans' wellness. We often learn that this is because some veterans are not receiving adequate formal support elsewhere.

In our experience, service dogs and animals generally can be an entry point for relationship development with an individual seeking and receiving care. In this way, the service dog is one pathway into veterans' lives. Thinking about that, professionals working with veterans need to be aware of the role of service dogs generally for PTSD and how to incorporate service dogs into their practice.

Service dogs can also be a barrier for veterans seeking and receiving care, and these concerns reside primarily at the systems level. A veteran with a service dog being denied counselling or service at a counselling office is a concern. A veteran being denied housing because of a service dog is a concern. There seems to be no standard experience across the country. There's a need for health care and allied professionals to be educated about the role of service dogs and the benefits in veterans' lives.

This leads to the fourth point, which is around standards. There is certainly a need for leadership in this area. While on our end, we're doing the research to establish the efficacy of service dogs and how they assist with the wellness of veterans, there appears to be a void and conflict as well as confusion about standards across the provinces and territories. The lack of consensus with the Canadian General Standards Board process several years ago has likely had many unintended and negative consequences. The lack of national standards has resulted in individual provinces taking assorted approaches to service dog public access. It is also leading to individualized policies being developed by organizations that are not experts in this area. For example, a university campus might be doing that.

We're making this statement to offer the insight that part of the lack of consensus during that process may have been that standards are trying to be made for dogs that are not doing standardized jobs. For some service dog organizations, the job of the service dog is more around the bond, that human-animal bond, and less the technical skills and vice versa, so service dogs are not trained in standardized ways.

A caution from our perspective about standards development is the need for a made-in-Canada approach that fits within our context, for example, provincial and territorial human rights service dog policies. As well as our point, the service dog organizations vary significantly in the programs that they offer and how service dogs are trained. These and other significant points need to be considered in standards development.

That all said, the goal of each service dog training program is likely very similar in intent, and that's to improve veteran wellness.

Our fifth and final point is linked to the need for standards. It's around our research team's adoption of a patient-oriented approach to our research in the area of veterans, PTSD and service dogs. This translated for us into the first veteran group, Audeamus, with Mr. Lohnes, who was speaking earlier. It was suggested that we as researchers really needed to train a service dog alongside the veterans in the program as part of an informed research process. A key finding for us from that process and based on our experiences is making sure that service dog welfare is at the centre of our conversations.

Service dogs are not tools. They're not devices for human welfare, even though they are complements in veterans' treatment and supports to them. They provide both technical skill and the benefits of the human-animal bond. As one researcher, van Houtert, and others wrote in 2018, they concluded that the lack of knowledge regarding the welfare of psychiatric service dogs creates risks for both human and animal welfare.

I'll end it there. Thank you.

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