Mr. Speaker, I thank the House for the opportunity to speak to this issue.
The compensation of our men and women in the military is of course one that we take as a cherished responsibility and an honour to live up to. We have created systems and processes to properly compensate those men and women who find themselves on combat missions, who find themselves in harm's way on peace missions, wherever they are deployed to make sure that their families are taken care of, that the reward for their sacrifice to this country is properly acknowledged.
There are systems in place to measure and to distribute this income to these families and to deliver the salaries and from time to time they need to be modernized and revised, especially in a world where conditions can change on what looks like a rescue mission that suddenly can become a civil war that suddenly becomes something even more catastrophic than that.
We have to redesign and rethink sometimes the policies that provide compensation to members of our armed forces. This is clearly the situation we find ourselves in now. This policy has existed since 2003. It is largely administered and assessed by an ongoing process inside the Canadian Armed Forces. When we discovered what had happened, we took steps to rectify the situation and made a commitment to the House and we will follow through on that commitment because we have the responsibility to do that not just as a government, but as parliamentarians.
We have challenges and those challenges need to escape the prism of partisan politics sometimes, although we have our fun across the floor, and we need to understand that this commitment to families is a sacred one, just as our commitment to veterans is a sacred one. We can all up our game on this and provide much more certainty, much more clarity, and much more fairness in the way in which these benefits are assessed and assigned and delivered. That is the commitment that this government has made. We can see it across all of government when it comes to veterans, whether it is dealing with homelessness, whether it is dealing with Veterans Affairs and survivor benefits, whether it is the motion that was passed unanimously in the House around PTSD. We made a commitment and this government will honour that commitment because this government takes that commitment seriously.
While there has been back and forth today, I think I can speak for all members of the House when I say that we can do better, we will do better, and we will do it together as a Parliament in this year.