Certainly.
Thank you very much. It's a good comment.
I would say right now that the biggest challenge, of course, is the transition of a military member to civilian life. Some people call it reintegration, but it is not reintegration for a military career professional who has spent 35 years in the military environment. It's not reintegration; it is integration. It's brand new, and there is a lack of good communication during the transition process, in fact on both sides: the military and Veterans Affairs Canada. In essence what needs to happen is that there has to be proof of service and there has to be an injury that has been diagnosed—and the relativity of those two—to be an eligible client of Veterans Affairs Canada.
Now, this is a multi-step process. The first, let's say, to get a disability award, is one step where all of these things have to come into play. Then there has to be determination, adjudication, as to the amount of disability, the amount of the award. Subsequent to that, if a person wants to go to a vocational rehabilitation program, again there's an application process. There's an acceptance process by the department.
What we're saying is that we need a one-stop shop where all these things are determined in advance, so that when there is a need it's already been determined that the eligibility is there. It's just the quantity that has to be decided.
Right now we are doing, jointly with the military ombudsman, a study of the transition process. The problems we see, which we've already identified, are a lot of duplication of effort, a lot of complexity, and a lot of misinformation. I will give you a quick example. A case manager, for instance, in the military side is a health care professional. On the VAC side, the case manager is a social services professional. To an injured veteran, especially somebody who has a non-visible injury, it's very confusing to say that now you will switch case managers but they don't do the same thing.
All of these things contribute to the complexity. It's a long answer, but....