Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to participate in the session. As the chair mentioned, my name is Charlotte Stewart. I'm the director general responsible for service delivery and program management with Veterans Affairs Canada. With me t

Veterans Affairs committee  Mr. Chair, I would respond to that question by saying that while our Canadian Forces member veterans are increasing in number, the overall decline in our client numbers is, unfortunately, precipitated by the disproportionate number of war service veterans who are passing away, an

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, there will be follow up to ensure, generally, that this is working appropriately.

Veterans Affairs committee  First of all, it's very important that we reach them and get information to them. Our expanded outreach strategy recently has had a key focus on making sure that we find our reservists, that we connect with them. DND is helping us with that because it's key. They have a different

Veterans Affairs committee  The transformation of the department is driven by demographics, and overall, the number of clients and veterans that the department is serving is going down. It's going to decrease, and the department has to adapt and respond to that and to make sure that our resources are put to

Veterans Affairs committee  Most of them will be paper-based; that's right. As DND moves more towards establishing electronic records for all of its members, then obviously Veterans Affairs Canada will be able to take advantage of them as they build those electronic systems.

Veterans Affairs committee  With respect to our perspective in Veterans Affairs Canada, the reason they would care is that it will reduce the amount of time it will take us to adjudicate on decisions. I'll just give you a practical scenario that actually happens. When everything is paper-based and we have

Veterans Affairs committee  The department, as we've spoken about, is going through a transformation and there will be about 550 positions that will be impacted by that. That's because we're able to reduce a paper-based system and build in streamlining. So there will be some positions that will be impacted.

Veterans Affairs committee  We employ a number of systems in the department, and I'll speak about a couple of them. The technology we use to improve our service delivery and enhance our service is not necessarily full systems that we're putting in place. We're taking advantage of the opportunity to use sca

Veterans Affairs committee  I'll speak to scanning. What it means is that when we work with scan—

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, it is. Currently, it's a very paper-based system.

Veterans Affairs committee  I want to clarify that point. What we do is scan documents as we require them. When a veteran is applying for a benefit or a service and we need the medical records, we ask for their file from Library and Archives Canada or from DND, we scan it, and then we have an electronic ver

Veterans Affairs committee  No. Generally what we do is that we ensure that the key medical information, and only the key medical information that is needed, is scanned. We don't need most of what's on the file. That's a very important point to make relative to the privacy and security of data. We're very c

Veterans Affairs committee  It is happening now. It was one example. By 2013—

Veterans Affairs committee  We are able now to scan and to extract the electronic info we need for those who are applying for benefits and services today; that's correct. In the future, we're going to be able to expand that, and we'll continue to do it. We're working also to improve services on our “My VAC