Mr. Chairman, could I respond a little bit to that?
I could have gone into this earlier in the day as well. I do know that the veterans organizations supported and helped design this charter, so it's not as if--and this doesn't sound very complimentary--a bunch of bureaucrats came up with this new charter. We sometimes think these anonymous people somewhere within the bowels of Veterans Affairs and DND did this. The charter was designed with the help of these veterans organizations and veterans. They were the ones who helped the department and the government put this thing together, so they are not offside with the veterans charter. Their fingerprints are all over that charter, and that is what they were asking for. They wanted a better way to provide service to our veterans, and the government of the day responded with the new Veterans Charter.
I want to emphasize again that this passed within the House of Commons without a vote. The present Prime Minister, who was then leader of the opposition, the Bloc leader, the NDP, and the Prime Minister of the day, Mr. Martin, plus the entire caucuses of those parties--the government and all the opposition parties--agreed on this. There was unanimous support. That doesn't just happen by accident. It happened because it was properly designed. It was properly thought through, and I believe it was properly executed. Our challenge was to implement it.
Some of that is reflected in some of those numbers today, which I actually put in my opening comments--I didn't call them “unexpected expenditures”. There has been a successful implementation. It is something that all parties in the House of Commons can take a lot of pride in because there is no controversy. It's one of the few things in this place that we didn't argue to death. Usually we just argue for the sake of arguing, but in this case there was no argument. It was the right thing to do. We support it.
Those veterans organizations today still support it. I want to emphasize that. Contrary to some opinions, they still support the new charter and continue to provide us with ongoing advice on the implementation--as do members of this committee, Mr. Chairman--on how we can improve it, how we can make it better, and what the next step is going to be. Without question, it has been a success. It has been successfully implemented, and we continue to listen to those veterans communities on how best to improve it.