National Defence Committee on Sept. 23rd, 2025

[Jeff Kibble, Conservative, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you.

That's been going on for some time. Are there quantitative results that have been generated to establish its effectiveness or not, that you're aware of?

[Robyn Hynes]

I haven't seen anything on this yet. We do keep an eye on a joint program between Veterans Affairs Canada and the Canadian Armed Forces regarding mental health and their joint suicide prevention strategy, which also speaks to mental health and resilience. I think there's another update of that coming out in the coming months.

[Jeff Kibble, Conservative, Cowichan—Malahat—Langford, BC]

Thank you. I feel that this would be an important metric.

As for PMQs, I think we're well aware of, as mentioned earlier, the shortages. Do you feel that this has an impact on both recruiting and retention?

[Robyn Hynes]

With regard to PMQs, our office has noted several challenges with the residential housing units across the country. I know there have been quite a few announcements and plans in place to address this moving forward. A lot of the plans that have been made to address this—that I've seen, anyway—have been more long-term plans. We are in talks with the department to see, with all of these reconstitution efforts that are coming, what's going to happen in the short to medium term to accommodate the new people coming in.

Barracks are also an area of concern for us; this is where people are generally living during training. I understand the ADM of infrastructure and environment has plans in place. I haven't seen those yet or what that's going to look like, but we continue to receive a significant number of complaints about the quality of barracks across the country.

[The Chair, Liberal, Charles Sousa]

Thank you, Mr. Kibble, for those important questions.

I'll turn it over to you, Mr. Malette, for five minutes.

[Chris Malette, Liberal, Bay of Quinte, ON]

Thank you.

Further to Ms. Hynes' reference to benefits, I saw in December 2024 that the Office of the National Defence and Canadian Armed Forces Ombudsman and the Canadian Armed Forces itself launched a new collaboration on an interactive tool for looking up military benefits. Can you elaborate more on this? How's it been going over the last nine months? Have you been able to quantify any results there?

[Robyn Hynes]

Sure. The product you're speaking about is called the military benefits browser. It was something originally created by our office back in 2018. It focused on the transition for Canadian Armed Forces members as they transitioned to civilian life with illness or injury. It's since been expanded. We worked very closely with the Canadian Armed Forces to expand the product to now include all the benefits and services that may be available to someone throughout their military career.

The purpose of the product was really to make information about benefits and services accessible to people so they could make more informed decisions. Someone who is applying to become a Canadian Armed Forces member can see what benefits and services they may be entitled to. A family member can access that information to say, I'm being posted from this location to another, what benefits might be available to me? I have a special needs child, what supports are there? It breaks things down in a very user-friendly way. You can sort, for example, by financial, mental health or physical health. There are a lot of supports there.

The last stats that I looked at, which are probably about a month old now, had 11,000 visitors total, but 9,000 new since the launch of the product. I understand it's being used across the Canadian Armed Forces and in the transition centres as well to help people prepare for different stages of their careers and meetings they may have.

[Chris Malette, Liberal, Bay of Quinte, ON]

Just further to that point, has it been reported that it's a user-friendly format? As we know, in some of these cases, some of these programs can have all of the best intentions but when you get into it you're so far into the weeds that some people give up. Is it fairly user-friendly?

[Robyn Hynes]

Yes, we've tried to make it so that people can get to the results they need in the fewest number of questions possible.

For example, the first question speaks to who you are as a constituent: Are you looking as an applicant? Are you looking as a regular force member, as a reserve force member? This is because your benefits and services will vary quite significantly depending on who you are when you're looking into the system. We really try to do it so that, in two or three clicks and answers of questions, you can get an initial list, which you can then filter and make smaller, depending on what your needs are, by answering additional questions.

[Mario Baril]

If I may add on this—

[Chris Malette, Liberal, Bay of Quinte, ON]

Please do, yes.

[Mario Baril]

I could test the system as well because I was new in my role and I found that—

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton, QC]

Mr. Chair, there is no interpretation because the microphone is off.

[Sherry Romanado, Liberal, Longueuil—Charles-LeMoyne, QC]

Chris, close your mike.

[Chris Malette, Liberal, Bay of Quinte, ON]

Okay. I didn't know it was on.

[Mario Baril]

Basically I was able to test the system, if I can say it this way, because I was one of the users three months ago, and I found the tool to be quite effective, to Robyn's point. Some other country—I can't remember which one—actually asked us to do a presentation about the military benefits browser as a best practice. I thought, this is fantastic; this is a beautiful initiative that is well regarded.

[Chris Malette, Liberal, Bay of Quinte, ON]

That's encouraging because I have CFB Trenton in my riding. I deal quite closely with them on a regular basis. I was speaking with the folks at the MFRC there, and of course, they work with a range of these. It is a program that they were pleasantly surprised by, let's say. Thank you on that.

I have one more question. What are the DND-CAF Ombudsman office's main observations concerning the CAF's grievance process? More specifically, how could the length of time it takes for the grievances to be resolved be shortened, or is that a real concern in your estimation?

[Robyn Hynes]

We do still receive a number of complaints about delays in the grievance process for the Canadian Armed Forces.

I know there have been a number of changes in terms of increasing digitization, which I think will yield results moving forward. We've seen improvements in the response time at initial authority. For final authority, they have made quite a bit of progress addressing their backlog, but the delays are still substantial. They've improved since the previous time we were in front of the committee, when we would have given you numbers where people were waiting at final authority for years. The numbers have improved, but it's yet to be seen, I would say, how far the initiatives will go in terms of actually reducing it to a timeline that we would think is more appropriate.

[The Chair, Liberal, Charles Sousa]

Ms. Hynes, thank you.

Monsieur Savard-Tremblay, you have two and a half minutes.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Could I ask you to always keep your earpiece in, to avoid situations like this where you don’t understand what I’m saying and then ask me to repeat myself? Especially if someone needs to be interrupted in the middle of their speech or if there is a problem with the interpretation, for example, it would be good if you had it in.

I will now return to my questions.

In June 2024, you published your report entitled “Defending Wellness: A Systemic Investigation of the Canadian Armed Forces’ Health Care Complaint Process”. The investigation revealed the absence of a formal process for handling health care complaints, which is a particular issue.

In addition, recommendation 1 of the report states the following: “By January 2025, that the CAF dedicate resources to implement a Canadian Forces Health Services Instruction on the administration of CAF health care complaints.”

Has this been done?

[Robyn Hynes]

We have seen some progress on this front. As I just noted with the regular grievance process, they have also implemented a digitized complaint system for medical complaints.

There has been a request put forward for additional resources for health services because, even with this new form, they were having trouble keeping up with the number of requests coming in, which was causing a significant backlog. I understand that some of this hiring has been done. I haven't seen the latest numbers for what those delays are looking like, though.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton, QC]

I imagine you are referring to the other recommendation in the report, which concerns a centralized monitoring system and is scheduled to be achieved by May 2026. Is that what you just mentioned?

[Robyn Hynes]

I would say that there are two different pieces on digitization. One is to allow people to submit complaints online and to do so in a way that is more efficient than the paper-based way that they were doing before, where it had to go through several different hands. The tracking system is something different. It's equally important. It's such a new system that is in place that I don't think they've been able to track and trend very much so far.

[Simon-Pierre Savard-Tremblay, Bloc, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot—Acton, QC]

The recommendation is scheduled to be implemented in May 2026. Do you believe that the target will be met?

[Robyn Hynes]

We follow up on our reports usually on a yearly basis. We haven't done the follow-up on this report yet to see where they are on it. Once that follow-up report is done, we would be happy to send it to the committee.