I'm glad to see you have a sense of humour in the morning, because they're going to be after me after this.
Veterans move across the line, especially in our cities. There's no way for an individual MP to know exactly where they are. The addresses change. We can do a mailout to every household in our ridings and still miss veterans.
You talked about the idea of a card. That's something we need to follow closely, to make sure we know where our veterans are as much as we can. The problem is not the veteran who wants you to know where he is; it's the veteran who doesn't want you to know where he is. He's the one we can't find. He's the one, as you mentioned earlier, whose family recognizes this problem, but they can't get help. We need to have some way to contact them ahead of time and let them know we're a contact point, that we're a service they can use.
Quite often, and all my colleagues can attest to this, many people don't realize they can go to their MPs for any problem, especially at the federal-provincial level. They just try to do it all themselves. They get themselves into a worse mess by not coming to our offices first. That's the message I want to deliver to the veterans in my riding.
I can go to the local watering hole, the Legion, and I can meet with them and talk to them. They talk to their buddies and say, “Well, get a hold of Valley's office and talk to him.” That's the only way we really have to contact them. There's no method other than that. Blank mailouts may not contact them.
We want to follow closely what you're doing, to see if there is a way we can reach out before there's a more serious problem.