Hold on. Let me finish.
It's a very significant provider that I'm referring to. They haven't given me the permission to share their name, but they're a very significant provider, so if they took 28 months, I can only imagine what a small service provider that wants to help a few veterans in their local area would experience.
It's not working. Veterans are not getting access to the providers they want to be able to access. You mentioned there's going to be some kind of a review before the contract is renewed, and I really hope this is going to be given a serious look, because there's a problem here.
We even heard the Lifemark folks themselves the other day acknowledge, after what they've heard from this committee, that there's clearly a problem in saying when the comment was made that it should be an “and” and not an “or” in there, clearly seeing that it's an “or” now.
Let me move to the communication. Regarding the recommendations that this committee put forward a couple of years ago, we were told, fairly inaccurately, that they had all been implemented. The union was one of the groups that was supposed to be better consulted with. There's a recent example that clearly shows this hasn't happened. When I asked the head of the Union of Veterans' Affairs Employees a couple of weeks ago at another parliamentary committee whether he was consulted before cuts to the Bureau of Pensions Advocates were made, “Absolutely not” was his answer.
I should say that we had a national management-union meeting on January 15, and no one told us that the Bureau of Pensions Advocates was going to be cut, even though they knew it.