It involves Mandela, so I think it's timely.
In 2000 I went to a conference in South Africa. I presented a speaker's pole to Nelson Mandela, and I got to spend some time with him before that. He heard I was from Canada and his eyes lit up and he said, “We owe a great deal to Canada”—“we” being South Africa. He said, “You gave us our constitution.”
I don't know if you know this, but the South African constitution was a product of the working papers of the Meech Lake accord and various other documents of constitutional puzzling here in Canada. It was used as the foundation for the South African constitution. In particular, one part of our discussion in Canada on property rights that we didn't choose to put into our charter of rights and freedoms was a fundamental part of the South African way of solving their problem. They needed that constitutional safeguard so that the white farmers wouldn't feel their property would be taken away.
What happened when I gave Mandela that speaker's pole is that he came down off the stage and embraced another white man in the second row of the crowd. I asked who he was. I was told he was his prosecutor, the man who had asked for the death penalty for Nelson Mandela.
There are two points to this story. If Nelson Mandela can go down and embrace his prosecutor, all of you from different political stripes can get together, embrace each other, and embrace the veterans and solve this problem for them. I assure you that this is a very serious problem. It's not just the suicides of the serving members that are illustrative of this problem. You don't even know about the suicides of people who aren't serving in the Canadian Forces. These are people who are suffering on a daily basis.
I ask you in the spirit of, well, in the spirit of Mandela, in the spirit of Christmas, in the spirit of whatever, to get this thing solved so that your constituents are treated in a fair way.