Mr. Chair, first of all, regarding Mr. Bill Tanner, I'm off to Calgary next week, and I'm adding an extra leg to my trip to go to Peachland to visit Mr. Tanner as well as Ken Barwise, both of whom came to my attention very early in my tenure as being people I should meet with. So I look forward to meeting Mr. Tanner.
Regarding meeting young soldiers, personally my approach to business--and far be it from me to make recommendations to the committee, but I certainly think my place is to meet young soldiers. I would suggest that where we separate the traditional veteran from the peacekeeping veteran from the modern veteran in Afghanistan, the monitor or tag line I'm embracing is that there's one veteran, and the needs of the so-called traditional veteran or the veterans of war service are going to be exactly the same as the needs of our so-called peacekeepers probably 20 years hence and what our young soldiers, sailors, and air force personnel serving in Afghanistan today might need 40 or 50 years hence.
The question was how did I feel as a young officer about veterans and that sort of thing. I must say, in all reality, the importance of institutions such as ANAVETS and the Legion completely escaped me. I never in my wildest dreams as a young person expected to be a veteran, and I must say that even though I used to instill in the young soldiers the importance of logging every injury and every sort of trauma you incur throughout your career, for veteran reasons, I was sadly negligent throughout my career, and it's coming back to haunt me now. All that to say I have another message that should be conveyed to those young troops who are serving Canada valiantly now in the campaign on terror.