I think there are a couple of things too. Most of the services that have been established to meet the needs of military or veteran families are close to installations, such as Petawawa or Gagetown. But when you talk about veterans, you're talking about every community from coast to coast to coast, and we're never going to have a military-specific program in every community.
What we can do is to make sure that every community organization that exists has some basic military literacy, that they understand when somebody explains that they went to Afghanistan, and that they know what that means and don't just have some reference from a movie they saw one Saturday night with their friends but really understand what that means.
I think there's enormous interest across this country by professionals of all kinds who want to be ready to reach out to help, and they want to learn. I think the way we need to manage that—we're doing the same with direct service—is to balance high tech with high touch. We want to make sure that people have the personal contact and those personal relationships, and that they get access to those services they need from human beings, but also have access to technology—perhaps to be part of a group—and the use of technology so they can participate over the computer.
There are lots of experiments and innovation and successes being had by those kinds of specialty programs, but if you're not in it, you have no idea that it exists. One of the things the leadership circle did last year was to try to pull together the beginnings of a one-stop shop for information so you don't have to Google what you need to add to your list but you can just plug and play a list of what's available. We created it as a 1.0 document.
In order for it be successful so you can plug and play for a distress centre, we need that to be accessible online, searchable, and almost like a Wikipedia, because things are happening so quickly. Right now that doesn't exist. The foundation is there but the technology isn't. It's in a book. It's like the old blue book in Toronto. You had it but it gets dog-eared after awhile. We need to make that accessible for everybody so that if you're a volunteer at a distress centre—boom—it's there, whether it's information about housing and homelessness, or whether it's information on food services or mental health supports.