I think we're maybe having trouble getting it all together. I agree that we're going to have a card. On one side we'll talk about the mission statement; on the other one we will have the six or seven rights that Michel will put together. That may be a good way of doing it. It was brought up earlier about having your mission statement or your goal on the one side.
The other part of it is the document. Obviously that document will make reference to the statements and to the references of explanation with it. Everything we do here has to meet the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. So I don't want to get hung up on that. We're going to get some legal direction from counsel on where we go on this.
The other part of it is, what's our commitment to it? On the second page, if you go to the second part on the signing--I believe that's where a lot of this comes from--it says: “Through the signing of this Veterans' Bill of Rights, the Government of Canada commits to delivering benefits and services that respond to your immediate and ever-evolving needs.” I don't know what other bills of rights there are with DND. I'm assuming the legal people will go back and look at what status they have. Is that a bill of rights in title only or in name only, and is it actually embedded in legislation?
What we're trying to do here is to make a clear commitment that will come in documentation, that will come in a card format. In that documentation it will be clearly that we're making a commitment as the Government of Canada. I would be comfortable with that, but we'll maybe have that debate when we hear back from counsel on what we actually should be doing or have to do for it to become a choice of ours. I'm assuming it becomes a choice of ours, but let's maybe have that debate at that time.
I don't want to micromanage Michel, quite honestly, and I think that's Roger's point. Let's give him some general direction of what we want to see in it. If we're at this stage now of one card on two sides, one document with a statement and references, and recognizing somewhere in here that everything is within the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, that's a given, and our commitment to veterans and that we're going to nail these down from 12 to 6 or 7, or whatever. There have been some suggestions in the last paragraph that the veterans bill of rights honour and salute this special group of Canadians. There's also the recommendation that Canada recognize its veterans and its families. I think we can have one or the other.
But I need some clarification...for example, I'll call it our promise too, which is a bit of a mission statement. We want to keep this. I'm suggesting that this bill of rights references veterans and families only. We aren't dealing with other emergency service groups; DND has their own.
Is that something we agree on? In the second part it talks about “Retired and Serving Members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and our other clients”. I don't know who our other clients are, but I suspect we would not want to deal with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, because that's not our mandate.
I am just wondering about some comments.