Some of them have been brought to the floor here by members of the committee on both sides, but the group of veterans that I think we have to really.... It's hard to focus on one group and not the other, but I think most of us get pretty emotional when we start talking about our 85-year-old veteran, that World War II veteran, and we are reaching out as much as we can to that aging veterans community, who are getting to the point in life where they do need help and they have never asked for anything in their entire life.
I'll tell this story, because I think we're going to have the time, and I hope, Mr. Chairman, I can have time to get it in. How fast we get there is always the question, isn't it, in terms of helping? But the simple answer to the question, Phil, is that those aging veterans are the ones I think about the most, in terms of whether we are doing enough for them.
When I was out in Arnprior a couple of years ago, we did an event out there and met a World War II veteran, and he told me about his family. I told this story in the Senate last year, just after the election. We normally do an event in the House of Commons and speak in the House, but we did the one in the Senate, which is always a great event, and I finally got this story into words in a condensed form.
In Arnprior, a veteran came up to me, a World War II veteran, and talked to me about having served and his brothers having served. They lived on a farm. He told me the whole story of how they enlisted and so on, a great story, and he said he got wounded, he got shot and got wounded and came back home. And I said, “I guess you're one of our clients”. And he said, “No, I'm not a client. I came back; I felt pretty lucky coming back home in one piece. My wife...I married a wonderful woman and we had a nice business, a great family, and we always did okay. I always felt that somebody else could use the help.” That tells the story of the whole veterans community. It's not like everyone's pounding on your door to get more. That's just an example of our veterans community. A lot of them don't ask for help.
One of the guys here had a question, and I'm not sure who it was, on how many veterans we have. We have about 800,000 veterans total in Canada, and we provide a direct service to a very small percentage of that 800,000, when you think about it. And I'm including the reservists in that 800,000, Phil.
That's an example right there of men who have never asked for anything, women who have never asked for anything, but they're reaching the stage in their life where they might need help. And I said to this particular gentleman, what would happen today if you died? If you died today and your wife needed VIP treatment, guess what--she wouldn't get it. He was not a client, and that could only be transferred under that set of circumstances. Those are the kinds of complicated problems within the department that we have to fix.
And going back to Mr. Stoffer's question, we have fixed part of it, but we'll never get there fast enough, as far as I'm concerned. It's always about taking the financial resources of the Government of Canada. How much can we do in industry? How much can we do in some of the other programs that we have? And how much can we do this year, right now, in Veterans Affairs?
So we have fixed many of those programs, Phil, and we have made it easier for some of those widows to get in, but the truth is that the frail and aging veterans population is the one that's the most heart-warming and heart-wrenching when you see how difficult it is for some of those people who are now getting into the last decade, if you will, of their life. I often say that this government or the next government will be the last government that can actually make a difference to the lives of those men and women who are now octogenarians.
If you look around and do the math, we have one World War I veteran left: Mr. Babcock down in Spokane, Washington. This gentleman is 108 or 109. I think he's 108, but once you get past 106 it's pretty difficult to keep track of the years. I think he knows the years better than I do.
That's what we're looking at, and it's not just a question I have myself or how I look at it. I'm not sure who the next person in this chair will be—it could be one of you or it could be somebody else—but the truth is that it's something I sort of grapple with myself. What more can we do and how fast can we get there? The line I use is that no matter how much we do for the men and women in uniform, we're never going to do enough.
We take so much for granted in this country. I mean, our basic freedoms we take for granted. These are the people who strapped on the uniform and did what their country asked them to do. I think when it gets to the point in their life when they need something, we should be there to help them.