Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Yes, I do believe the bill of rights should follow up on this. Also, under the health, I don't know about the rest of you, but the one biggest complaint I get from veterans is when they apply for hearing aids or hearing pensions. The vast majority of them get turned down because it's very difficult to prove that standing next to a gunner or big guns on the ships in the forties led to a hearing loss today.
One of the premier audiologists in the country, Dr. David Lyon, is in Dartmouth, in Mike Savage's riding, and he works solely on veterans. Some of them get hearing aids, some don't, even though they may have worked on the same ship at the same time. It is one of the most irritating little problems that we have. It's very important for them, but for us, when they go through the appeals, we send it to the minister and we speak to the regional people on the ground, and they're just turning them down left, right, and centre. Most of these guys just want hearing aids.
So when we go on to the health concerns, Mr. Perron's issue is extremely important. That's an issue we do need to deal with.
It would be interesting to compare the PTSD of today to shell shock, what was known as shell shock before. It would be interesting to get some veterans in to see how they reacted when they came back after that, and to get some comparisons on it, on whether things have improved or not.
On the hearing loss, it would be interesting under the health aspect to bring in someone like Dr. David Lyon to understand why there is difficulty in accessing either pensions or hearing aids for veterans when it comes to hearing loss. That's the one I deal with the most, and it's most frustrating.