Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Reservists are indeed a vital part of our Canadian Forces, significantly contributing to Canada's success in military operations. Over the decades and during the recent years of high operational tempo, our reservists have volunteered to serve either on active operations at home or abroad, or by backfilling important support roles. In fact, at one point at the height of our operations back in February of 2010, 15,000 of our 27,000 primary reserve members were on full-time service. Individuals from across the country answered the call to duty in a time of need and voluntarily took leaves of absence from their regular jobs or education programs to serve full time with the Canadian forces. They've been instrumental in keeping our military operational and successful, and I think all Canadians owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude.
Mr. Chairman, the reserve force pension plan is designed to provide members of the reserve force with a modern pension plan that matches their level of service and provides them benefits comparable to those of their regular force counterparts.
It is also aimed at ensuring that the Canadian Forces retain reservists and are able to continue attracting talented men and women.
The Government of Canada began work on this plan in the late 1990s, in response to demands from reservists, parliamentarians and Canadians. It was an extremely complex undertaking, requiring a substantial amount of work to plan and implement.
In fact, when the department introduced the reserve force pension plan in March 2007, it was the first new pension plan to be introduced in the federal public sector in more than 40 years.
We knew we would have our challenges. The unique nature of a reserve service means that no two individual cases are alike. Therefore, developing a generic system that would account for every possible scenario was close to impossible. Furthermore, some of the members' records dated back from the 1960s, when these had existed only in paper format, if at all, thus requiring a substantial amount of time to extract and consult.
While the department was aware of some risks associated with these challenges, we decided that these were not sufficient to delay the introduction of benefits to reservists, as the risk mitigation would have resulted in further delays to the plan's implementation. We therefore proceeded to introduce the reserve force pension plan in March 2007.
As a result, we learned many lessons from the implementation that reshaped our approach and have permitted us to identify ways in which the program could be improved to quickly apply lessons learned and start making adjustments for increased program efficiency. I'm not sure that we could have predicted these lessons by delaying the implementation to study it further.
Mr. Chairman, many of the issues raised by the Auditor General's spring 2011 report were similar to some of our own observations made after the implementation of the plan. We therefore agreed with the findings and recommendations of chapter 3 of the report. In fact, the department has been working to address the issues for several years.
Since the publication of the Auditor General's report, we've made significant progress on the management action plan. We've hired and trained additional staff to address backlogs, growing the team from 132 in March 2007 to more than 230 employees today. We continue to assess whether another spiral of growth, with its associated spike in plan administration costs, would significantly improve the situation. We've improved internal controls, adding additional document checks to prevent errors. We've addressed systems issues, improving the way the applications are processed.
With these improvements, we have doubled our capacity to process files every year since 2007.
We also recognize the importance of open and clear communications with reservists. To improve this, we will have an interim website solution in place by March 2012, with the final website available by next December.
In addition, the military pension renewal project, which is currently at the approval stage, will review the overall business process and administrative systems of the plan.
As already noted, this has been a complex and challenging undertaking, but I believe we have established significant momentum, and we're continuing to build on this momentum. We recognize there is still much work to be done, but at the same time we'll continue to look for ways to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the RFPP's implementation in the months and years to come.
Today my colleagues and I welcome this opportunity to address any questions you might have.
Thank you very much.