Mr. Chair, first of all, I would like to thank the member for his appreciation. I was not the deputy minister at the time of the Syrian refugee initiative when most of the heavy lifting was done, and I wish that Anita Biguzs were here today to hear this. I'm sure she would really appreciate it.
However, David is with me, and he was one of the lead ADMs on the initiative, as was Dawn Edlund, our associate assistant deputy minister of operations. We do appreciate it. It really was a big lift for the department, and one of those seminal lifetime events, I think, for everyone who was involved with it.
We are committed to implementing the action plan that has been set out and has been provided to the committee. It was very helpful for us in terms of providing us with insights into what we can do better.
On the issue of service expectations, we certainly do have descriptions of the services that we expect will be provided, and we have now put in place service expectations for language training that are quite detailed. I think one of the challenges for a national program that is this broad and diverse is having a consistent set of expectations across all the various organizations that deliver the programs in various circumstances.
One of the commitments we've made in the action plan is to clarify our service expectations in other areas of programming that we currently undertake, such as welcome and orientation, and to roll that out over the next six to 12 months as we update our contribution agreements.