Thank you very much.
Thanks for coming in this morning.
I find it a bit ironic for us on this end of the table that we're talking about aging. We all aged quite a bit last night. We had our Christmas party and we're feeling a little older this morning.
I can definitely sympathize with some of Mr. Lirette's comments. I serve a riding that is very rural, very widespread, with very small communities. You talked mainly about the services you're trying to provide and languages and everything else, but I'm sure that even in northern Quebec and other places in Canada, not only in my own riding, we get to where there are no services. We almost take anything we can get. Personally, in my home community, we don't have enough doctors. We have three doctors. There are supposed to be 16 serving there.
With the challenges of serving people as they age and with all the complications that come when you don't have services and you have to travel, it gets tougher; and then when we put the veteran into the mix, with all the issues that they can have, it just gets harder and harder.
So I definitely sympathize with all your efforts, and we're lucky we have people like you who are trying to provide these services. That's one of the strengths of Canada, that there are groups that try to step forward and bring everybody together.
I have some questions for Mr. Shaw.
I shouldn't generalize, but one of the things we do hear from some of our veterans is that they don't feel well served by the Department of Veterans Affairs. They feel that there are gaps and flaws. In your experience, is that a similar thing for veterans around the world? Is it similar in Australia? Do they feel that they're well served? We have guests up from the United States once in a while, and they don't feel that they're well served by some of their veterans departments when it comes to health care. And of course, problems always compound as we age.