It's every two years, so if you're in Afghanistan and then you go back in two years and one month, you have to redo the whole training again.
I know it doesn't directly relate to.... That's operational, that's DND, but we're in that zone, and it became clearer than ever to me that there is a transition time that both our committee and DND need to be engaged in. They become Veterans Affairs clients as soon as they become veterans, which is the day after they leave the military, so there is a joint responsibility. Right now they're treated as being in silos. You're with DND until you're not with us, and then you're with VAC if you're not with DND. It just seems to me that the whole idea of the transition is worth.... It may be only a statement in our report that the transition itself just needs to be looked at more carefully.
There were some other ideas I had, but on a personal level, it was unfortunate that some of you weren't able to go. You missed a couple of really good meetings. I leave it to others if they want to say anything else about it.
Our staff did no bragging on their own; they just sucked all the changes in. I know they did a tremendous job in having to cancel a trip and then put it back on track within a matter of hours. They just did what they needed to do as professionals, and they were very professional about it. I just wanted to mention that.
I'll leave it at that for now. Those are some ideas from my little book of notes that I'd like to put on the table as we get back to the report. I'm not sure if Melissa actually prepares a little summary or something that we can look at; that would be good.
We should probably pick a date to wind up the report. I know it's essentially done, except maybe for some tweaking based on this last trip. As soon as we can, I think we should wind it up, because no one knows when we're going to be into an election.