Thank you very much for the question, and it obviously is an important one.
For Veterans Affairs programming, we do not provide acute care, as you know, but we do provide treatment benefits for service-related disability, as an example. In the normal course, Veterans Affairs is guided by Health Canada. It's guided by acceptable medical practices and treatments in Canada, so there are standards we follow. It's not arbitrary, by any means. If a veteran comes to us and says, “I understand that a certain treatment is provided in another country”, we will certainly look at that and try to determine whether there may be some opportunity for recognition in Canada of that particular treatment. If not, then depending on the nature of the claim, the frequency of it, and so on, we will look to ways and means to try to help out.
I think the ombudsman pointed out the example of service dogs for psychiatric conditions, which was a very good example. The challenge we had there was that we had veterans coming to us, saying, “Look, you know what? I have a service dog, and it's really providing me with a lot of relief.” The challenge was that there were no standards in the country for training and acquisition of service dogs. Secondly, there was no evidence to show that having a service dog is an acceptable treatment methodology for a mental health condition.
What the department has done, basically, is embarked on a bit of a research project through a third party to look at both of those issues. If the results of that prove favourable, then that would be something we would immediately move to put on our treatment benefit list. Equally, you should be aware that the Americans were facing a very similar problem, and I understand that they have a very big study under way looking at similar issues. We will equally look to that to see what other research is out there that might help to support us going in a given direction.
The issue for us, obviously, is that we always have to be very concerned about not doing any harm by supporting a treatment benefit if there's no scientific basis for it and no foundation for it. That is always a concern.