It's a question that is relevant to the time in which we live. There's certainly work being done by the two organizations, ours and the Canadian Armed Forces, to try to forecast and understand that growth in recruitment and retention in the military and then what the future forecast is for that departure to Veterans Affairs. Undoubtedly, there will be an increase in the number of veterans in the country over the course of the next years and decades.
I want us to come back to some of the analysis in that regard. First and foremost, I want the committee to have confidence that the Veterans Affairs benefits—that is, our disability benefit program, our rehabilitation income replacement benefits, etc., as I mentioned earlier—are quasi-statutory in nature, which means that they grow with the demand. From a purely financial point of view, the number of veterans who apply for benefits is the number of veterans who receive those benefits.
The second component is processing and capacity. We are thankful that budget 2025 included $184.9 million to stabilize the disability processing workforce in order to ensure that processing keeps pace. It also invested in a program called service modernization, which will see technology around efficiency and effectiveness of that program moving forward. The delivery of that particular benefit is virtual in nature, so infrastructure and physical location are not consequential inputs to that conversation, because the workforce is virtual across the country today, and the service modernization to enhance the veterans' journey will be the first step in meeting the increasing demand in the years and decades to come.