I'm sorry you guys thought that was funny, but I assure you that it's not to veterans; I assure you they are paying attention. As the chair of this committee for a couple of years, I learned very quickly how much of an audience there actually is for this committee, how important this committee is and how diligently members watch these proceedings.
The opposition clearly sees that as a joke. They're laughing and chatting over me right now, but it's not a joke. It's incredibly important to keep that in mind as we're doing this work in public, which is not the convention. The convention typically is to do this work in camera so that we can have challenging conversations—and tough conversations, sometimes—to get to the right spot and do what's best for the subject matter of the day.
By us doing this in public, I hope that people start to recognize this and start to encourage their members of Parliament to move on, to get to a point where we can really focus on the strong issues of the day that veterans face and that we rededicate ourselves to getting back on track to start producing some tangible recommendations to the government.
I'll tell you that this particular issue we've studied at length. The minister has been here a couple of times on this issue. I think extending this, making it into a much bigger thing, is something I warned about right from the very beginning, and I will continue to say how unfortunate that is, given how much is in front of us and how much we still have yet to do.
None of us are here forever and we have a limited time to the work the people of our particular constituencies send us here to do. I'll be honest with you: I will not look back on these last couple of months fondly as a part of my career that.... It won't make into my memoirs. Let's just put it that way.