Perhaps, Mr. Chair, I will respond to the question.
Stakeholder engagement is an area of great interest to the department, to try to ensure we are working with a broad range of stakeholders. There may be some confusion on this, but previously we had a number of advisory committees that were set up over time, such as the Gerontological Advisory Council, the New Veterans Charter Advisory Group, and so on.
These various committees generated a number of reports over the years, going back some time now. Within those reports, roughly 250 recommendations were made. Of those 250 recommendations, the Department of Veterans Affairs has basically actioned about 160—fully or partially. Of the remaining, some of them were simply not feasible to implement. Some of them we've put on the side table. We're not dismissing them by any means, but they will come back to us at a future time as we look at various initiatives around transformation and around modernization of our health care programs.
But those were advisory councils. In the last few years, Veterans Affairs has had a very strong relationship with core veterans groups, with the traditional veterans groups such as the Royal Canadian Legion, ANAVETS, War Amps, and so on. We do realize and understand, however, that engagement needs to be broadened, so in the last year or two we have made a considerable effort to try to extend that outreach to a much broader range of veterans organizations. Some of them are fairly new. Some of them are largely founded in social media, for instance; however, all of them have outreach and an important role to play.
Over the last year we've had three meetings at a national level with a larger group of veterans stakeholders, and that is a committee we've been working with to try to share common issues, hear concerns of veterans organizations, and help us prioritize future directions. That's one aspect of a stakeholder strategy. There are certainly many others that we're working on to broaden our reach and engagement.