Brevity is not my strength either, so don't worry about it.
Let me put it this way first. We have articulated after years of working on it that unless there is an atmosphere within Canada and the Canadian people, and within government circles—and I speak of parliamentary circles too, which seems to be there, but also within the bureaucracy, which doesn't necessarily seem to be there—such that you feel a covenant, not a social contract because that means you've negotiated stuff, just like the current Veterans Charter….
I'm the one who in a day and a half pushed it through the Senate and I've regretted it ever since, because it didn't reflect the 10 years of work we had done before. It was a bureaucratic piece to try to save cash and it hamstrung the minister with all kinds of regulations. That is a new phenomenon in legislation. Before there weren't many, but now they're throwing a whole whack of them with legislation.
That new Veterans Charter doesn't need a new one. It needs a significant reform. In there you will find in the reform a lot of the answers these guys and girls need in order to get the appropriate responses and a timely response. Until you hit that target deliberately, you're going to have a problem.
The only way you can convince people to go that far is if you actually believe that there's a cradle-to-grave responsibility, not to the age of 65, not with a reduced way of life, but an actual covenant that they have committed themselves to unlimited liability, recognizing that they've come back injured, that their families are being affected, and that some of them are dead and their families are obviously affected, and then you've got them for life.
If you don't sell that, then you will not gain their trust. I'll tell you, it started right rotten with the Gulf War syndrome. We did everything to prevent them from getting anything. Every lawyer in town, every medical staffer, gave us arguments why we couldn't take care of them. That undermines the operational commitment of individuals. Do I want to get injured? It undermines also the families, and they're the ones who are creating a vacuum of experienced people because they're pulling their spouses out.