When Veterans Affairs, in 1946, acquired a lot of this large hospital capacity, there wasn't anything out there in the community at all. With the coming in of medicare, social safety nets, established programs, financing of things that all parties support over the years, there are now 220,000 to 235,000 long-term-care beds. In terms of making a selection about where they're going to go when they need long-term care, home would be the best place to go if they can do it, of course, but if they need to go into an institution, as it were--to use a pun, given this committee--they'll vote with their feet. They'll go into the community eight to nine times out of ten. We have a lot of experience to show that. We feel the Canadian Forces veterans are probably like the traditional veterans: if you give them the choice to go into the community, that's where they'll probably go.
Second, we would need a parliamentary change. We need a significant regulatory change to re-establish for Canadian Forces veterans what the traditional veterans had. We have to remember, there was no choice back in 1946 for traditional veterans.
Mr. Stoffer, you raise the British experience. I notice that Mr. Allard is here from the Royal Canadian Legion, so he's had a look at the paper we've prepared on this and made some corrections to it. Generally, what has happened is the British went to a lump sum system the year before the new Veterans Charter came in. The tariff doubled it to £500,000 to £560,000. My son lives in England, and I know that the price of a gallon of gas there is almost two and a quarter times what it is here. He paid $800,000 for a small home where he lives in northern England--and it's a very small home. So the cost of living is a little different.
Secondly, if you look at the top four tariffs that the Ministry of Defence has, for the most severely disabled, there may have been one or two awards. There have been none at the top tariff yet, despite the fact that their military is three times as large as ours and they've had bigger deployments since 1990.
I have great respect for what the Ministry of Defence in Britain does. The job placement program we adopted holus-bolus, and I think it has the elements of success. I think the apples-to-apples comparison suggests that in terms, at least, of the amount of the disability award, things are not quite what they would seem with that direct dollar-per-pound comparison.