Thank you so much.
I want to thank all those who have been here to testify.
For those who have served, I want to thank you so much for your service.
To start off, what I'm going to do is ask everybody about my first point, because I think you all spoke to it. I'm going to start with Mr. Turpin because he hasn't spoken yet.
What I have heard from many veterans is that services are not veteran-centric. They're not focused on the needs of the veterans. I understand that that's very complex because veterans have had many different experiences.
One thing that really concerns me is that services at VAC don't seem to be trauma-informed. What I mean by that is I've heard and read a lot of things come out of VAC where the tone very much says, “You're not behaving, and if you don't do what we are asking you to do by this date, you will face consequences and we will remove everything.” That worries me. Obviously, if people are in that kind of need for care, they often do call yelling. They often do have to process that in a way that can be very hard. I would love to see people better trained to respond in that way.
Mr. Turpin, perhaps I will ask for your opinion on workers at VAC having a deeper understanding of trauma-informed services, hopefully with a lot more veterans working there to provide services to veterans.