Veterans Affairs committee  Right. These would be specialists in health promotion and disease prevention. Those are two flip sides of the same coin. If you get health promotion going, you're going to prevent disease. There are a number of training programs across the country producing people who are expert in the area of health promotion itself, so that would be one possibility, but there are other health specialists you could build this on.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, it is.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you. I'll pass that on.

Veterans Affairs committee  It could be extended. Again, the council was formed to give advice on these traditional veterans. There was the other council, the Canadian Forces Advisory Council, established for the Canadian Forces to give advice regarding the Canadian Forces veterans. We give advice when we're asked.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, we certainly do outline that. I don't know exactly what page it's on either, but we do explicitly suggest that. For one thing, all veterans are aging. Aging is not just something that happens to people over the age of 80. As I mentioned, not for all Canadian Forces veterans, but for all the Canadian Forces clients, their average age is already 53 and climbing.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you for that question. Certainly I know members of council have often said about this report and other recommendations we have made that we see Veterans Affairs Canada being in a good position to show leadership for all Canadians. Along with Health Canada, Veterans Affairs can develop programs that work and demonstrate that they work, which then could become a basis for extension to all Canadians.

Veterans Affairs committee  First of all, we did not explicitly consider costs, and we were asked to outline a general system that would be the best system in principle. We recognize that any system costs money, but the idea would be to try to get as close to that goal as possible. What I said in response to the earlier question, and this is just a guess, because the council has not done the costing, was that there would be an increase in cost, but it would be like a kind of bubble, because there would be more services going to these veterans, but the older veterans, the ones who are the target of our report, are dying, as we note in the report, so those costs would not be long term.

Veterans Affairs committee  I'm sorry, it came from the deputy minister as well. I beg your pardon. I'm sorry—what was your last question?

Veterans Affairs committee  There was a change of personnel. It was a woman—Oh dear, I'm sorry.

Veterans Affairs committee  I was asked by the deputy minister to do this, so I don't know exactly if the request came from him or from higher than him. The deputy minister asked us to do it.

Veterans Affairs committee  It took us a while to get going. Once we finally made the commitment to do it—we're a bunch of volunteers, you know—we actually managed to put together the report in maybe ten months. There was a lot of work. We had Dorothy Pringle, who's a former dean of nursing at the University of Toronto, and who just received the Order of Canada, by the way.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's right.

Veterans Affairs committee  The without costing part came from the ADM.

Veterans Affairs committee  We had a sense that things were moving slowly for a while but are maybe picking up steam now. The department has basically indicated that it is strongly supportive of the report, and it thinks it's a great report and it will be useful. I think it's been made clear that it's advice.

Veterans Affairs committee  I don't have the table in front of me now, but you've probably seen it. When we first look at it, there's a list of benefits that can be received, down one axis of this table. Then there's a list of different categories of people who can receive different kinds of benefits, if you can link it to war service, different categories for different—the merchant marine, for example.