Yes. Thank you.

The organization that my wife and I co-founded is a thing called Paws Fur Thought. We raise money and advocate to place service dogs with disabled veterans. By very definition, 100% of the people that we deal with are suffering from OSIs, primarily post-traumatic stress disorder.

In the year that we've been doing this we've either placed, have at the fully certified level, or in training, over 30 dogs. That gives us a cohort of 30 veterans.

One of the common themes, in terms of what you were talking about, is care for our most seriously injured. Many of the people that we deal with are dealing with very complex mental injuries. They're elbows and eyeballs deep in the mental health system, which unfortunately is beyond the scope of this committee. But that poses some serious challenges because oftentimes after you leave the military and you are a veteran, because of our training, because of our operational tempo, because of a variety of different things, we are very misunderstood in the mental health care world. That poses some challenges.

The other part of it is that, in terms of service delivery and support for the families, oftentimes these people that we're dealing with, when they initially come to us, are not capable of dealing with a lot of the complexities, the paperwork, for a variety of things. Probably the My VAC portal frustrates just about everybody. I don't know of anybody who has that thing working right. I know I gave up. I just called my case manager and said, "Send it to my wife. Whatever you want to deal with, send the paper to her because I don't get it."

I reiterate, in full support of what Barry says, that to expect people who are suffering from serious mental health challenges to behave rationally and follow a set of guidelines that would be laid out, you might as well try to push Niagara Falls uphill with a paper clip, that's about how useful it would be. It just isn't going to work. I think there has to be a real understanding that the nature of the..., especially the complex mental health injuries, really have to be looked at in terms of the service delivery model and how we make it more user friendly to people who are struggling within that system.

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