Good morning to you, Minister Barker. It's late in the afternoon for us.
I must tell you, before I begin, that I'm quite impressed with the workload you carry. I've looked at your CV, and you're not only the Minister of Veterans' Affairs, you're the Minister of Courts, the Minister of Internal Affairs, the Minister of Civil Defence, and the Associate Minister of Justice. I'm the parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Veterans Affairs and I am very grateful that he does not carry all these other portfolios. I can't imagine what that would be like.
With regard to some of the things that were said earlier, Agent Orange is an issue that we resolved fairly early in the mandate of this government--probably not to everyone's satisfaction, but it was something that had not been resolved for many years, so we took care of that.
There was another comment made that I would like to clarify for you, so you don't leave with the wrong impression. Our government knows where our veterans are, but because of privacy issues, we don't disclose a list of veterans to individual MPs. As individual MPs, we have the ability to send to all our constituents any kind of information we want, and that includes veterans. It might not be satisfactory to all, but it's better than not knowing where they are, for sure.
We have a program in Canada we call the VIP program, the veterans independence program. You alluded to wanting to go down that same route. You sound like you have some of those parts in place already, if not all of them. We've managed to add another 24,000 “Margarets”, if you will, in the last two years. We're very proud of that.
We'll have to talk about this off the air sometime, but I'm very interested in your Hire A Hubby program. That sounds very intriguing.
Voices: Oh, oh!
Mrs. Betty Hinton: I'm also very interested in what you mentioned earlier. I think if I heard you correctly, it's not in place yet, but it's coming, and that is a card with a chip when people leave the military. One of the things we've discussed is that we don't want to lose anyone in the transition from active military to the veterans portfolio. That would be interesting, if you could answer that.
I'm doing all this talking, because he's going to cut me off, so if I ask you the questions, I'm okay.
One of your core values, as stated on your website, is to ensure consistency and accuracy. How do you ensure that services provided by the department are delivered in a consistent and accurate manner? That would be my first question.