It's a really good point, because the role that families play is quite critically important.
I'll address it in two ways. There are certainly benefits under the new Veterans Charter that accrue to family members, but I'd first like to speak to it from the point of view of involving family members in the decision-making process along with the veteran.
Keep in mind that when you're dealing with rehabilitation related to veterans, and it's their condition they're dealing with, the veteran has to agree to the participation of the family. But it's certainly something that we encourage very strongly at the time when veterans are sitting down with area counsellors or case managers in the field to talk about what their needs are, the level of their disabilities, and what kind of services should or ought to be in place to help them. We very much encourage the participation of the family, because there is often an impact on the family in certain ways through the nature of service, the disability, and so on.
It's also been our experience that family members have another perspective to offer. Sometimes when veterans may not wish to discuss certain things, the spouses or the family members may in fact bring certain issues to the forefront. When the veteran is agreeable to that as part of the process, it certainly helps us a great deal to identify needs and put certain benefits in place. It's the informal involvement of the family member.
On the more formal side, coming back to my point that there can be an impact on family members themselves, we created a number of benefits in the new Veterans Charter.
Firstly, if a veteran is disabled to the point he or she can't benefit from the rehabilitation program, those benefits would then become program benefits directly for a spouse. In other words, the focus of the design was such that if the benefit couldn't go to the veteran, we would try to assist the family.
There's a whole range of other benefits as well, which include things like access to counselling if the family members are dealing with issues themselves and, of course, very extensive death benefits if, in the unfortunate situation where that happens, the family needs access to income replacement and compensation for the loss of a family member. It's a fairly comprehensive involvement.