Thank you, Mr. Chair.
As a NATO veteran and a member of Legion 175 Kingsway in Edmonton, I welcome you all. I appreciate the work you have done and the work you are doing and the work I know you will do, and the rest of the veterans here.
In your sort of chapters 1 and 2 here in the Legion submission, I think you made some fair statements. There's a lot of talk about the lump sum versus the new Veterans Charter, and how a fairer evaluation should include all of the benefits that are accessible and should include an overview of additional benefits available under SISIP. Comparisons continue to be made between the disability award lump sum paid out and the monthly disability pension paid out under the Pension Act, and these comparisons do not provide a fair overview of what is provided under the new Veterans Charter. I would agree with that.
There are a host of benefits under the new Veterans Charter. To me the issue has always been access and burden of proof, that we make folks jump through too many hoops to get to it. To me that issue is burden of proof. We set the burden of proof too high. I haven't heard anybody here today say it, but there's an insurance company mentality within VAC that says you'd better prove beyond a show of a doubt that you need the benefit, and I understand why they do that.
The other issue to me has always been transfer of information—call it communication—between DND and Veterans Affairs. Because of the Privacy Act getting in the middle, they can't just transfer information back and forth. If we could lower that burden of proof—and there's no magic number—to something more reasonable and get the Privacy Act out of the way of communicating, how far would that go in a philosophical way to helping the problem? I know you can't give a definitive answer.
