One of the members of our subcommittee who is very well versed in this area and has done a lot of personal research into it is Brian Forbes. Quite frankly, some of our suggested solutions are based on best practices, if I can use that term. It's not necessarily just in the military but in the broad spectrum. As you'll notice in one of our comparisons, we take that lump sum payment, for example, which we give our soldiers if they lose a leg or an arm, or whatever, and compare it to what would happen in the civil sector if you lost your arm or leg in a car accident, or whatever. It's about a half. It's significantly less in the military case. Without beating that particular horse, one of the things we're trying to get to here is to treat our people fairly and equitably, like we would treat anybody else. If a soldier loses a leg, that should be at least the same as if you lose a leg in a car accident. That's really what we're trying to say here. We're not saying they have these gold-plated awards, but we should be actually looking for comparability. I would suggest other militaries are certainly worth looking at. The Australian model is certainly one that VAC has looked at. We should probably look across Canadian society too, because we are a different society from many others.
On November 19th, 2009. See this statement in context.