Thank you.
Further, actually, to what Peter was saying, and earlier comments, I don't question the good intentions of Betty and all of us on making veterans feel ultimately that the department cares about them. That's really what this is about, that the department--and whatever government office--cares about them, and here's a list that verbalizes, puts in print, what they care about.
At the same time, we have a responsibility as a Parliament, as parliamentarians, to make sure that when we hand somebody something, it has a degree of meaning—at the end of the day it has a degree of meaning from zero to 100.
So we will get some legal advice. I think we would have to make it clear on the large, full version of the document and some miniature summarized version, somewhere, that this is a legally binding document or it is not. There has to be a clear statement of what power or lack of power that document has.
If it is a mission statement, if it is a statement of service principles.... Because there are no timelines like “You shall get an answer to a letter within one month,” or “You shall not stand in line at the office for more than 15 minutes”. There are no quantified levels of service; they're all wonderful statements of good intentions.
But it's the very thing that you said, Mr. Chair. There's going to be some time, somewhere, that a veteran is going to feel grieved by something, and it's going to be tested. Well, we can't just throw that out carelessly to the courts.
None of this is meant to be a criticism of the good intentions of a bill of rights. We just have a responsibility upfront to be as smart about it as we can be, so that when it's done, it does serve the purposes for which this is intended. We don't want to mislead, that's all.