That's a good point. You can go back 40 years. I think back to when we were stationed in Germany—a young family—from 1960 to 1963 with a battalion. That was when the Berlin Wall was going up and the Cuban crisis was going on and so forth. When you were deployed, there was always a concern about what was going to happen to your family. Well, they had to find their way to the base and they would eventually get backloaded to Canada. That was the extent of the family support. Thank God for the regimental system, because it would kick in.
But since then, leaping ahead, as I keep bringing up, the Veterans Affairs and Canadian Forces advisory council was asked to come up with recommendations regarding a charter: either amend the old one or have a new one. During those deliberations, Mr. Pierre Allard, who is here today, from the Royal Canadian Legion, was a member of that council, as I was, and a number of us were tasked to go to various bases to talk to the troops informally, 30 to 40 people, privates to captains, a couple of ex-warrant officers, without any names taken, to have a round table discussion, with the consent of the base commander, with the consent of NDHQ, and so forth. We were supposed to do three—the army, navy, and air force—and we ended up doing eighteen of those.
Concurrent with our movements were two female members of our council who were there to talk to the families, sometimes at the military family resource centre, and sometimes they didn't want to meet there and would meet someplace else, at reduced numbers. It came out loud and clear, not only from the troops we talked to, that first of all they were grossly overtasked and stressed right out. They were stressed out, and the people who were left back were stressed out. When you have a section of four and three of them are gone, and one person has to do everything, what effect did that have on the family? Our family team brought it out loud and clear when we made the presentation to the deputy minister and others, and eventually to the minister, and it was accepted, that of all the things we were considering at that time, family would be at the top of the list. Believe it or not, ahead of the veteran, family would be first.
That report was passed and accepted by the minister and his department with the drafting of the new veterans charter, and so forth. So that's where it started. Since then, of course, as you've heard, this program has evolved in the last five years. It was written initially by Stéphane Grenier at his kitchen table: How am I going to influence the system to help my peers? And by the way, my wife has a problem too, because I have become a recluse. I've become a recluse, she's become a recluse, and there's an effect on the family.
That's not just unique to Grenier; it's unique to a number of us who have gone through that process: Where can we get some help? So the family has to come into it, but you have to walk before you run. The idea was, with the two champions of the OSISS program at the time, General Couture and ADM Brian Ferguson from the Department of Veterans Affairs, let's move forward, get the peers running, and we will address the family.
It may sound like, well, okay, bring the family along. They were brought along, and they're both together now and they're both being addressed. I'm getting into the business of the two co-managers here, but from my understanding, they're both being addressed. Sure, there's lots of work to be done.
Kathy or Mariane, do you want to add to that?