Veterans Affairs committee  Just to add to that, I was an executive member on one of the six organizations, and I have yet to see any passage of the bill of rights. I'm a member of that organization. I haven't been consulted, and I'm at the executive level. People aren't being consulted, and that's just an example.

Veterans Affairs committee  To answer your question a little further, I've been involved in this for over nine years, especially with the organizations. There's a transition that's happening right now. The soldier in Afghanistan, at this point in time, really doesn't have a voice. In most of the veterans organizations, the traditional ones, and in one of the major ones, two-thirds of the membership have never been in uniform.

Veterans Affairs committee  I've been on the advisory committee for the ombudsman for four years. I've been there since about a year or so after Mr. Marin started, and I'm now with Mr. Côté in that level. So I've seen the development of the office through that committee. And for members of the forces I've directed to the office who have needed help, I've seen their results as well.

Veterans Affairs committee  One issue you have to look at is if the DND ombudsman is reporting to the Minister of Defence and now he's looking after Veterans Affairs, who's his boss? He has two. On the resources side, if the DND ombudsman takes 2,000 and all of a sudden it spikes up to 30,000, what's that going to do to his office?

Veterans Affairs committee  To answer your question on the connection between the two offices, under the current mandate for the CF ombudsman, former members can go back with a complaint. The issue then becomes where the dividing line is between a VAC member and a former member of the Canadian Forces. So that's going to be something that has to be worked out.

Veterans Affairs committee  It's all going to depend on the training of the staff. The current ombudsman's intake calls for the year were around 2,000, and he had four intake-call personnel to accept those. If you're going to look at a community of 400,000 or 700,000 veterans, even if you have 30,000 intake calls, you're going to have quite a large staff that needs to be trained to understand how to deal with those intake calls and to understand which ones are actual complaints, which ones are not, and which ones may go back to the DND ombudsman.