It's a good question. Actually the department, including me personally, has paid a lot of attention to that.
The VIP program, as you well know, is in one sense a cost-saving measure for the Government of Canada, because it's a good program that allows veterans to live at home in dignity, postponing, if you will.... I guess living at home might be a better way to express it; the care they get at home is always much better than institutional care. So it's a program that's a great success.
In terms of extending the program, those are numbers that we have gone over. In fact, we've had a number of meetings on what the Government of Canada can do if you extend it this far, extend it logically out to where you would like to see it extended.
I'll just give you some numbers here, Anthony, so that you'll know. We have 86,000 war-service veterans who have overseas service who are ineligible for VIP service. That's a big number. The estimated cost of providing VIP services--including home care, long-term care, community beds, and related treatment costs--to all of those currently ineligible, including the widows and caregivers, would be $500 million a year. So again, it's something that we all, I think, would like to do. It's a case of how you manage that cost and how far out you want to extend it.
I do know that previous governments have moved it along a little, but we're still not where we want to be on it. Let's put it that way, to be very honest with you. So at the end of the day, I guess the short answer to your question would be that the cost to the government would be about $500 million a year to extend it to where people like us would like to see it. That would be at some point a decision that the government of the day would have to make.
Again, going back to the previous government, those are some of the decisions the previous government made in terms of the affordability of the delivery of that program.