Veterans Affairs committee  I'm not really in a position to share those with you today, because the process that is under way needs to be respected, and that process is—

Veterans Affairs committee  Again, I can't answer that. My understanding is that the process is moving ahead well. I'll probably have a chance to discuss that with Mr. Hillier, but I haven't got a status report on where it is and what the content will be. So I want to be able to respect that process.

Veterans Affairs committee  I'm not aware. There may well be. I know that other departments have service standards similar to the kinds of service standards that we've put in our At Your Service brochure—other departments have that sort of thing. I'm not aware, sir. I'm sorry I may not be able to respond to that today, but I'm not aware of whether other departments have a bill of rights or not.

Veterans Affairs committee  Again, not knowing exactly and not being able to comment totally on the process, I go back to what I said earlier. We expect that this would give greater assurance and even greater clarity to veterans across Canada and clients of this department about what they could expect from us.

Veterans Affairs committee  I will comment quickly, sir, that if you know of any case like that, we'd like to talk to you about it so that we can see if there's anything else we can do.

Veterans Affairs committee  We don't want to give up on it, in any case.

Veterans Affairs committee  We work extremely well together. For the older records, they are actually in the possession of the National Archives—and correct me if I'm wrong here, Ken. For the modern veteran, they're still in the possession of National Defence. We work very closely with National Defence. We have a number of initiatives under way, and one of them is the continual pursuit of improving our access to their service records by providing resources on bases to photocopy information and to look at better, more technologically up-to-date ways of transferring information from the department.

Veterans Affairs committee  As I indicated earlier, I have to continue to remind the committee members that my mandate is not to talk about what the content of the bill of rights or the process will be, but I can tell you in answer to your first question, sir, what the process is relative to the application of the benefit of the doubt in policy terms.

Veterans Affairs committee  Perhaps I may respond quickly. We will provide survey questionnaires. Mr. Gaudet has asked for the surveys. I'll provide those, as requested.

Veterans Affairs committee  There's an awful lot of information to collect for a first application, and I should mention that we are actually exceeding that standard. We are averaging about four months at the moment. It's a standard that we probably should revisit, given the performance improvements we've made.

Veterans Affairs committee  We have roughly 210,000 to 220,000 clients out there.

Veterans Affairs committee  Well, I certainly see it as advantageous that we would have those mechanisms in place. I'm not in a position today to really answer that question--in the sense that it would require an understanding of the precise mechanisms that are going to come forward and how they would be introduced--other than to say that I'm certain it will be a great advantage to us to have those mechanisms in place.

Veterans Affairs committee  Absolutely.

Veterans Affairs committee  As I said earlier, we're not satisfied with the 84% even though it's 84%. We still want to work very hard to see if we can improve that through our service improvement program, which we launch after each one of our surveys. We look for ideas of how we can improve services in these areas throughout the department, from people who make suggestions and from other sources.

Veterans Affairs committee  The service standards are in a number of forms, but certainly the general service standards are here and in your service booklet. We can send those to you, should you wish to have them for your records. Secondly, I should mention for the long-term care facilities that we actually have 10 outcome standards that are measured.