Lately, Hehr has offered a sports analogy to relate to veterans’ struggles after the rank and uniform are gone. “I look at this from the perspective of a former athlete. If you talk to NHL hockey players, what’s the most difficult year they have?” he asked a Canadian Club of Calgary luncheon in January. “The first year they leave professional sports. Gone is the applause, gone is the rigour of daily events that structured their lives for the last 25, 30 years.” His most difficult year, too, he says, was after his disability.

It’s a novel comparison. Does it work? “It’s exactly the way I felt,” says Jim Lowther, who served in Bosnia and the Persian Gulf and works with homeless veterans. “You just feel lost. I was terrified.”

(...)

To understand Kent Hehr’s path from bullet hit to cabinet, it helps to understand his parents. Not only did Richard and Judy sit at the head table with their 46-year-old son for his Canadian Club speech, but his dad, a club member, introduced him, beaming that his son was the city’s top eight-year-old at hockey, and then the top 12-year-old in Little League baseball, both according to his coach. Kent qualified that praise: his dad was his coach. “I think I spoiled him,” Richard confesses in an interview. “He sometimes had a little trouble listening to what the [other] coaches told him to do. He had his own ideas as to what was in the best interests of the team.”

• Kent Hehr: The Energizer Bunny who’s back in the game - https://macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/kent-hehr-the-energizer-bunny-whos-back-in-the-game/