Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Welcome. It's a pleasure to have you here today.
I'm going to do some general stuff; my colleagues will ask some specifics.
As you know, we're doing part of the Veterans Charter review as a committee, and either fortunately or unfortunately, the witnesses we tend to hear from are rather critical. I know this is a complicated, frustrating process for everybody, but I want to get into the bigger picture stuff.
I'm absolutely convinced that if we could only put up some interesting wall charts to show what the success rates are, where the failures are, that overall a lot of this is working better than we're hearing. What we hear is where things aren't working, and it colours the picture a bit. I'm not trying to say the world is great; I'm simply saying we tend to hear a lot more about the negative than the positive. As an example, witnesses have said very clearly, “Life was so much better before the charter; if we were only back to the old pension system”...and so on.
Can you give us a comparison, in a general sense, of what we would be missing had the charter not started? I'm not looking for specific individual things as much as what the charter responded to that wasn't there before. We have to really get into that.