Thank you, Senator. You used the term “overwhelmed” a number of times. I think you've overwhelmed us this morning with some of your information.
I'm going to go to the last thing I wrote down following Ms. Hinton's comments. The veterans need a bosom buddy and they need another veteran. It goes to some of the other comments you made earlier about the legions, and I understand that. I spent nine years in municipal government trying to make sure my Legion survived in my home town. After becoming an MP...I have eight of them now that need help and support. As you mentioned, veterans need veterans, but when you get out into areas like ours, there's no one out there. We have a very sparse population. My riding is a thousand miles top to bottom, 600 miles across, so it's a long way between anything, and if we can't support the local organizations that really support the veterans and the reservists, we're really going to have a problem.
So we have that issue where there is no support out in those far-flung regions, and how do we reach out? You've given us a couple of ideas on that.
You did mention one other person who I've had a chance to work with, Dennis Wallace. I was very surprised when I actually met the individual, because he had the ability to bring everybody together in the room, and I was amazed at that. No matter how controversial the issue was, he could bring everyone together, and that's the kind of advice we need.
But my question goes to the point, which you've mentioned and which we've seen here in this committee already, about the silos that are built up. You mentioned that we should be out in the field talking to the people who are serving now because they're going to be our clients. But when we try to do that the walls come up right away. We're here as the veterans affairs committee to deal with veterans, and when we see an issue that's going to affect our people in the field, we want to address it, because everyone who is in the field now is going to be our client eventually, yet we're not allowed to pursue that or to talk about it.
So that's the challenge we have. There are the silos that are here. We can only devise policy and everything else that will deal with veterans, yet we've got how many thousands or hundreds of thousands coming towards us in the future. We need to be talking about how we protect them now so that when they are our clients in the future, we can have some protection for them then.