DND quietly shelves report from investigation into inadequate care for ill and injured troops
Chris Cobb, Postmedia News
National Post
29 June 2015
The Department of National Defence has quietly shelved an investigation into the much-criticized units created to help Canada’s most vulnerable ill and injured Afghan war veterans and other troops being transitioned out of the military.
The military ombudsman’s office is calling the DND move both “surprising and disappointing” amid reports from within the Joint Personnel Support Unit (JPSU) system that it continues to fail many troops who have been left with severe mental and physical injury in the service of their country.
In a report more than 18 months ago, the ombudsman criticized JPSU for being inadequately staffed with personnel ill-trained to deal with serving war vets at their emotionally lowest points.
JPSU, now seven years old, is an umbrella unit for 24 Integrated Personnel Support Centres (IPSCs) across Canada and was created to offer programs to support and enable mentally and physically injured troops to resume their military careers or, more realistically, to make a gradual transition into the civilian world with sellable skills.
In a series of Ottawa Citizen articles that helped to spur the ombudsman’s 2013 investigation, injured troops and former troops complained that the system was a shambles, with overworked staff regularly unable to cope and suffering burnout.
In one case, a staffer became so stressed that she joined the ill and injured ranks and became a posted-in member to an IPSC.
Ombudsman Gary Walbourne told the Citizen on Friday that his office had postponed its own deeper probe into JPSU last year on the understanding that the defence department would be conducting an investigation and issuing a public analysis and report on its findings this month.
DND now says that it will be 2017 before any report sees the light of day, even though it apparently began its investigation with visits to IPSCs a year ago.
Walbourne is refusing to wait another two years.
He is asking DND for all the data and feedback it has gathered so far so his staff can kick-start their own investigation without replicating what DND has already done.
“Given the importance of the Joint Personnel Support Unit and the fact that ill and injured CF members are posted there during one of the most stressful periods of their military careers (not to mention the impact on families), I feel an evaluation of the JPSU governance model is essential now, rather than later,” said Walbourne.
The ombudsman said he would be asking for DND’s data “to avoid duplication of effort and unnecessary additional costs to the tax payer.”
DND confirmed to the Citizen that the JPSU probe will be delayed two years but said the ill and injured units are “one piece of a much larger evaluation.
“That evaluation was only at the preliminary stage and no proposed drafts had been completed,” said a DND spokesperson in a emailed statement to the Citizen.
“We didn’t stop midway through it,” added the statement.
The ombudsman has acknowledged that improvements have been made within the JPSU system — notably with increased staffing that began in late 2013.
But there are no current, publicly available data to measure the progress, and reports from inside the system suggest that it continues to lack much needed resources and structure.
Chris Dupée, founder of the help group Military Minds and released from the military last December, says the system continues to fail many of the ill and injured who are “falling through the cracks.
“The intent is good, but the implementation is terrible,” he said. “(Support Centre) leadership have their hands tied because they can’t even gather everyone for an hour a week under one roof and make them feel like soldiers again.”
Dupée, who was released from an IPSC in Toronto, says some mentally injured soldiers are allowed to stay away from base because the contact triggers anxiety attacks.
Others get business-owning friends or relatives to “hire” them when, in reality, says Dupée, they are spending those alleged work hours alone at home “staring at walls” and ignoring email and phone messages from supervisors.
The situation is worse at combat bases such as Petawawa and Gagetown, where IPSCs are in “brutal” shape, he said.
“The good thing about JPSU is that there are lots of programs,” he said, “but these troops are at their lowest. They need help to get through the system and they’re not getting it.”
Retired master warrant officer Barry Westholm, who was second in command of JPSU’s massive Eastern Ontario region before resigning in protest at the system’s deterioration, wrote to federal leaders two months ago to warn that support centre staffs and troops continue to suffer consequences of a poorly run system.
Westholm, who also addressed his email to Defence Minister Jason Kenney and Veterans Affairs Minister Erin O’Toole, pointed to recent suicides and one alleged murder among troops posted into Eastern Ontario region JPSU.
“The JPSU has the makings of an incredible proactive assist to our military’s ill and injured (and their families),” he wrote, “but it is being horrifically mismanaged at the highest level.
“It takes a one-on-one relationship, not a Power-Point presentation, to accomplish rehabilitation/reintegration our ill and injured service-members,” he added. “It takes good people, strong leaders, empathetic leaders, creative leaders … and patience.”
Ombudsman spokesman Jamie Robertson said that although DND says its probe of JPSU is part of a wider evaluation of military processes, Walbourne wants to focus on JPSU for the immediate benefit of the ill and injured.
“It’s about making that transition less stressful,’ he said. “Those ill and injured soldiers deserve it.”
