EDMONTON—A sunken scar runs from the bridge of Tim Senft’s nose to the crest of his cheek under his left eyelid. A veteran of the Gulf War, Senft’s most noticeable scars are not from combat — they’re from scraps on the street.
“What kind of dumbass would fight a soldier? You know I’m gonna get back up,” Senft says gruffly while puffing on a cigarette outside the Early Bird Café, an Edmonton diner that offers free coffee to local homeless folk in the early morning.
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Senft is a veteran of the United States Armed Forces who served for five months in Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Although he draws his ancestry back to Sturgeon Lake First Nation in Saskatchewan, he was born in Edmonton and spent most of his life in York, Pa., with foster families after social services took him from his home when he was 3 due to his parents’ heavy drinking.
Senft is homeless, and while he survived the war, he still battles demons from his time in combat.
After returning to Canada from the U.S. in 2008, he bounced around the country before settling in Edmonton. He worked for some time at the now demolished York Hotel before losing his job and finding himself without stable housing since 2012.
It’s an issue that affects at least 2,950 homeless veterans nationwide, according to numbers published by VETS Canada based on a shelter count done by the Canadian Observatory on Homelessness in 2015.
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“That’s a really weak number compared to what we’re seeing,” said Jim Lowther, president and co-founder of VETS Canada, a national charity organization and service provider for Veteran Affairs Canada.
He estimates the actual number of homeless veterans is likely closer to 6,000 to 7,000, because only a fraction of homeless veterans spend their time in shelters, often couch-surfing or sleeping on the streets or in hotels.
Lowther said his organization has received more than 6,000 requests for housing assistance from veterans since 2014.
“We formed VETS Canada because we noticed there was a gap. We noticed these veterans were falling through the cracks and they really needed help,” Lowther said.
Veterans often contend with physical disabilities, which can present barriers to employment, undiagnosed mental health issues such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, challenges with substance abuse, and income insecurity. All of these factors contribute to veterans finding themselves homeless.
“Once they deem you unable to serve in the military, you’re done, your career is over. And that’s when the spiral starts,” Lowther said.
“When they get out and they wind up homeless or in crisis, it’s due to their military service,” he added. “Because they weren’t like that when they got in.”
Lowther, who did a tour in Bosnia in 1997, said his own PTSD was triggered five years after returning from combat. He remembers watching Behind Enemy Lines with his son when he suddenly had to run out of the movie theatre to throw up in a garbage can.
“I thought I dodged a bullet. I thought I was fine … You can only bury it for so long,” he said.
He struggled with nightmares, irritability and anxiety before seeing a doctor and getting diagnosed with chronic PTSD.
In Senft’s case, he had returned from his service in Saudi Arabia and was attending a parade dedicated to returning soldiers when he realized something was not right with him. Since then, he’s wrestled with depression, PTSD, as well as alcoholism.
“You try to still keep your chin up as a soldier, but you still have all this suffering in your head,” he said.
A separation from his wife Michelle and his son David is when his life began to really unravel. He turned to alcohol to numb his emotions.
“That destroyed me,” Senft said. “My life was falling apart. I was heavy into the alcohol. Seeing (my son’s) smile on his little face took away a lot of my pain. But I still kept drinking.”
Substance abuse is common among veterans to silence the noise in their head, especially when they’re lacking family support, Lowther said.
“When you’re having these nightmares and daydreams and you can’t sleep, you just want to try and stop that somehow … you want to try and numb that as much as you possibly can,” he said.
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In addition to addictions and mental and physical disabilities, there’s also the fact that there’s not enough help to assist veterans with transferring their skills from the military into qualifications they can use for employment.
“When you go through boot camp, you are a highly effective, trained soldier. And when you get out … you don’t know how to be a civilian. And nor do you want to be one,” Lowther said.
David Krug, a spokesperson for the Royal Canadian Legion’s Alberta-N.W.T. Command, said veterans with PTSD can be hesitant to reach out to organizations that request personal information. Part of that may be because of a military culture that teaches soldiers to fend for themselves.
“Interacting with organizations that might be requesting administrative info about them might put them into a situation they’re uncomfortable with,” he said.
“It can be mentally challenging to swallow one’s pride and say, ‘I need help’ ... And they may not feel they deserve the help,” Krug said.
Lowther doesn’t believe that is the case. He says veterans are more than willing to reach out for help, but government bureaucracy and red tape make it a long, arduous process.
“There’s just not a lot of help out there,” Lowther said. “When (veterans) reach out to Veterans Affairs, they get frustrated … they need help now, they don’t need help in two weeks.”
VETS Canada tries to fill in the void by helping veterans connect with doctors, look for apartments, fill out resumes, and retrain for employment. Meanwhile, the legion helps facilitate support groups and access to services and benefits they may not realize they’re entitled to.
“The incidence of veterans not necessarily knowing they may qualify for certain pensions or payouts is actually quite high,” Krug said.
There are many programs across the country working to help veterans acquire housing, employment and other necessary services. VETS Canada is partnering with an organization called Raising the Roof to renovate vacant and dilapidated properties into affordable housing for veterans. They currently have two projects underway in Ontario and are expanding the program across Canada.
In Calgary, the Alberta-N.W.T. Command joined forces with the Calgary Food Bank to operate an emergency food assistance program after a food bank specifically catering to veterans was shuttered. Now they’re working together so the food bank can refer veterans to the legion to address broader issues, such as a lack of mental health services.
“It allowed for greater interaction between the veterans themselves and the service officers to identify the wider challenges they’re facing, and to address those in a more holistic fashion,” Krug said.
Lowther said there are three pillars to getting veterans back on their feet: greater accessibility to mental health services, more money directed toward social housing specifically for veterans, and more programs to help equip them with skills for long-term employment.
“The government is doing better than they were, but they can definitely do more,” Lowther said. “I think people are busy with their lives and don’t realize how many veterans are suffering.”
In particular, he’d like to see the federal government step in and allocate money from the national housing strategy announced last year to housing for veterans.
“We have a national housing strategy, which is great, but organizations like mine need to have access to that money,” Lowther said, pointing out his group is largely volunteer-based and has helped get hundreds of veterans off the street.
One project he’s excited to be involved with is a newly announced veterans service centre in north Edmonton, located steps away from an apartment building purchased by the provincial government. The building will provide transitional housing for 15 homeless veterans, and is expected to open in 2019. The service centre will be run by VETS Canada, and it’s the first collaboration of this kind in Canada, Lowther said.
“Men and women who have served in the military make incredible sacrifices in the line of duty ... This new service centre and transitional housing will be key in helping ensure veterans at risk of homelessness have the supports they need,” said MLA Nicole Goehring, Alberta’s liaison to the Canadian Armed Forces.
Everyday Canadians also have a part to play. They can help by volunteering with organizations like VETS Canada, or donating to the many Poppy Funds that operate across the country.
Senft said he’s been working with local organizations to try to find housing, but so far, they haven’t been able to find him anything in Edmonton.
“They want to send me way the heck out to Stony Plain,” he said. “If I went there by myself, I’d be alone. That’s not good for me.”
Senft said he relies on his friends in Edmonton’s inner-city and the River Valley to get by, and still depends on alcohol to get through the days.
“It’s the only thing I have left to really keep me going,” he said.
Senft said he doesn’t blame anyone but himself for his circumstances, contending he hasn’t done enough to improve his living situation.
“I hope things get better, but I haven’t really done anything to make that happen,” he said. “So it’s kind of my fault.”
At the very least, Senft hopes Canadians who hear his story will take a moment to remember veterans more than once a year.
“Just recall your hard times. Because we’re still going through hard times. A veteran will never forget.”
Fri., Nov. 9, 2018
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