You're correct. It's not necessarily on the agenda, but I will address it. Thank you for your comments.
First of all, we have prided ourselves over the years that we have never received any support from the government. We are apolitical and we would like to maintain that status. We are not looking for government handouts in any way, shape, or form other than when we try at the local level to get a tax exemption from the municipality, or approaches of that nature.
We had our headquarters down on Kent Street for 50 years. We have built our new headquarters in Kanata. If you, as a committee, ever get a chance, we would certainly like to welcome you there to tell you what we do. I don't think there's enough information out in the public about what the Legion is about. You may want to take that into consideration.
Having said that, a number of non-government organizations certainly struggle to survive and maintain their membership. We will continue to survive as an organization. We will continue to maintain our mandate. We will seek new ways of looking at the way we govern ourselves. We will look at our governance model. We are in the process of doing that right now. We have initiated a unity initiative, if you will, to bring some of the other veterans under our umbrella.
We're currently participating in the new Veterans Charter advisory group. To make sure we are linked with the Canadian Forces veteran of today, we have brought in to that group a still serving military member who has seen service in Afghanistan. We want to establish links and routes to the Canadian Forces.
We have established new programs to meet the needs of the Canadian Forces. We are very present at the Canadian Forces show tours where we send elected officials. We sponsor the major show tours and go into Afghanistan. We're now promoting buying a coffee and donut from the Legion for the troops that are deployed in Afghanistan. That's a program we've just initiated.
We are reaching out to the Canadian Forces member, realizing that he may not join us today, but he will more than likely join us in the future if he sees what our organization has brought forward. In that context we also think our advocacy efforts on behalf of Canadian Forces members, veterans, and families will eventually garner us some support.
I'd like to point out, even to the department, that even though they organized the second national symposium on operational stress injury in Montreal, this was really the third national symposium on operational stress because the Legion organized our symposium in 1998. It was in Charlottetown. We brought together some of the same experts who were in Montreal this year, or in Montreal four years ago. They discussed operational stress, and they ensured that eventually operational stress injury would be recognized as an entitled disability by Veterans Affairs Canada.
We are confident that our advocacy work on behalf of Canadian Forces veterans will garner us some support in the future. With those other initiatives we will survive. We will survive as an independent organization, and we will not seek government support other than the local initiatives I indicated.
For the small branches that are struggling we actually have a consultant for housing projects but also to look after real estate. Sometimes local branches are sitting on valuable land, valuable resources. Through the auspices of Veterans Affairs Canada we have a consultant who basically--I won't call it a secondment--through a partnership agreement has been in Charlottetown since 2000 and provides advice to our local branches to be able to survive and use the assets they have and go on into the future. This is where we stand.
We know we're being attacked. We were attacked in The Hill Times yesterday. I brought you a copy of our rebuttal if you want to see it. We're hopeful that this will be published in The Hill Times next week.