I can't get away with not saying something on this one.
We're taking an institution that hasn't moved its doors in a lot of years. We're taking an institution in a bureaucracy that's been sitting there, very comfortable in doing its business the way it has been doing it, until all of a sudden we had 158 casualties, serious deaths, in Afghanistan and people coming back and saying “We need a new way to do business”.
The Legion fully supports the aims of the New Veterans Charter to make a person well and get them on their feet again, instead of simply continuing to support an injury. But if we hadn't made our noise and hadn't made our moves, we would never have had Bill C-55 come forward to make some of those changes, to move the New Veterans Charter out of its concrete. It's supposed to be a living document.
Processing and reassessing how business is done at VAC should be a normal institutional everyday way of life. It hasn't been. So when we say that the changes are coming and they're institutional, they need to come. It's about time.
Doing business better with the modern technology, it's a wonderful thing. Yes, we can do business better. But as I've said before, it's not a cookie-cutter situation. We're dealing with a very diverse group of people and we have to remember that. We can't paint everybody with the same brush. It's a very diverse, wide group of people.