Veterans Affairs committee  Thanks, Mr. Harris. First off, I will say that situation is extremely unfortunate. If the member you are referring to is still having challenges, then we would be more than happy to, behind the scenes, reach out to her directly if she is interested in working with us. With rega

Veterans Affairs committee  Good morning. Thank you for your question. Specifically, what that means is those files do not sit in our queue. Once that file is received and we have identified all the information we need, it moves directly to a decision-maker and jumps ahead of other files in the queue, giv

Veterans Affairs committee  We have been processing the claims for military sexual trauma within our service standards. Normally, we process those claims within our 16-week service standard. Now, many of them get processed more quickly than that, depending on the volume of MST claims coming into the system

Veterans Affairs committee  Each veterans benefit team is made up of approximately 20 to 25 staff members. That includes intake officers, benefit program officers who adjudicate less complex claims and disability adjudicators, who are all nurses. There are between 20 and 25 on any given team, and that's how

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Harris. Thanks for the question, MP Blaney. First off, here at centralized operations division, we established a military sexual trauma unit in 2020 in order to deal with the files that were coming forward in regard to sexual trauma, sexual harassment, and gender-

Veterans Affairs committee  With regard to the unit, it itself is permanent. It has been in place since 2020. It is our intention to keep it in place as these claims continue to come forward. There is a mix of permanent and temporary staff, as is the case in all of our operational areas. Right now there are

Veterans Affairs committee  Absolutely.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you very much for the question. As Mr. Harris noted, there are two steps in our decision-making process. The first is to determine entitlement. We look at whether or not the medical condition the member is coming forward with is related to service. Are we able to connect

Veterans Affairs committee  It does not, Mr. Casey. We, as I said, have our own process, which is separate and distinct from SISIP's, so we follow our two-step process, which is unique to Veterans Affairs and is not impacted by any process at SISIP.

Veterans Affairs committee  Is that for females in general, or just for military sexual trauma?

Veterans Affairs committee  In the past fiscal year, 2022-23, we received just under 1,400 claims for military sexual trauma. Some of those would have been in relation to the Heyder Beattie class action. Others would not have been. They would have been just people coming forward on their own. The year pri

Veterans Affairs committee  I don't, unfortunately, right now, Mr. Chair, but I'm happy to come back with that.

Veterans Affairs committee  In regard to military sexual trauma, we were responsible for processing all the claims in the Heyder Beattie class action suit. I have some statistics in regard to that. Of all the claims that came forward, 72% were from females. Although the claims period is closed for those cla

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Casey. Good evening, everyone. You're correct—we are conducting a multi-year, multi-jurisdictional review of the table of disabilities. We started that a couple of years ago, and we anticipate having it completed at the end of this fiscal year, so by March 2024.

Public Accounts committee  In terms of the gap that we see between male and female veterans when they come forward, the deputy and the Auditor General have pointed out correctly that the biggest issue we face is that how military service impacts women veterans is oftentimes different from how it impacts ma