Yes. We had laid out a synopsis to bring it all together. From 1996 to about 2000, there was a lot of work done within the Department of Veterans Affairs because the department was receiving signals from many people that things had to change for a lot of reasons. One reason was that, given the increase in the operational tempo, given what we were hearing from veterans, and given what we were hearing from stakeholders, we had to change what we were doing in the programs at the time. That then led within the department to teams being brought together to look at this issue, and in the end what that lead to—and this is the watershed—was the establishment of this committee led by Dr. Neary in 2000.
At that time the decision was made to establish a committee, what I call a committee of experts, to bring them in, including all the stakeholders, who then, Mr. Chair, looked at this issue from 2000 to about 2004. As I mentioned, it wasn't linear where they just went into a room, closed the doors, and came up with ideas. They did sit down, they spoke, they did consultations, and, as Janice would tell you, they went out to the field and consulted at times across bases and wings with men and women in uniform.
Once they had completed their work, they wrote their report. Again, I would encourage the committee to read the report, as Minister Fantino has asked the committee to look into this. It's worth looking at. They then used the report to show what had been learned as part of the journey. They presented the report at that time to the government, to the minister, and then the Department of Veterans Affairs established a special team of people who came to work each and every day, and all they did was sit down and start putting together what we call the new Veterans Charter. It's a team that was brought together, a pretty large and multidisciplinary team, that included representatives from the Canadian Armed Forces. As they did their work, they went out and consulted with stakeholders, and at the end, what you have, Mr. Chair, is the announcement of the legislation and coming into force in 2006. I don't know if that answers the question.