Absolutely. As you've heard from previous witnesses, the department has undertaken a variety of different measures to try to streamline and make more effective the types of services we're providing to clients. Our focus is to ensure that those who need us the most will have the people in front of them and beside them that they need to help them.
We've tried to streamline the administrative activities that exist in the department: the processes, the mailings, the forms, all the paperwork, all the various items that people do on a day-to-day basis, and automate them, rid ourselves of multiple client signatures and multiple forms for different purposes.
That enables us to take the people we have—and other resources as well, because it's not only the people we have in our offices. We have instituted Integrated Personnel Support Centres, we have OSI clinics; we have access to 200 critical case managers and to over 4,000 mental health providers across the country. So we've expanded the base of potential service points for clients well beyond the borders of our department, to ensure that veterans who are scattered across the country—not only in large urban centres and not only in centres where there is a higher percentage of CF members and so on—have a variety of different supports and different ways to interface with the department and get a much broader spectrum of services than they may have needed in the past.
We know that today's veterans, unlike the veterans of previous years, who were confined to an age cohort that was maybe four or five years apart—those who were in World War II and so on—have a very broad age range and therefore a very broad range of needs. As a department, we need to respond to that, and ensure that the types of services and the way we service veterans corresponds to that wide scope of need as well.