I'm going to backtrack a little bit again.
Our organization was receiving a horrendous number of calls from veterans and their families concerning the situation. At that time, back in 2012, a lot of people were committing suicide or attempting it.
That's when our organization developed the Major-General Lew MacKenzie Fund, and donations started coming in for that. We used up the fund and have been trying to replenish it ever since.
We very happily held two national military service dog summits and brought together a lot of stakeholders. The Canadian General Standards Board was one of the organizations that wanted to present at those events to talk about standards, and they did.
As I mentioned earlier, after the second event took place, at the very end one of the veterans stood up and asked me ask if it was okay if all of of them voted on whether or not our organization could represent everyone. She said we were the only impartial organization that exists in this sector. She said that they'd like me to see if they can have a new proposal to CGSB to see if it's feasible to develop this standard. It was a unanimous decision, so I wrote the new work item proposal and submitted it to the Canadian General Standards Board.
The process did start out fully with the intention of doing the study itself prior to developing the standard. Internal conversations between Veterans Affairs, the CGSB and others we weren't aware of were happening behind the scenes, and a decision was made that they were going to proceed with the development of the standard.
Back in 2019-2020, since the previous process had failed, we went to ground zero and conducted a year-long service dog feasibility study. We actually did an industry and marketplace study. That is available on our website and in my briefing as well.