Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good morning to everybody there in person.
Ms. Hogan, thank you for the work you and your team do. I have always said that I value your work and the work of the Auditor General's office, especially now. I think your comments have been blunt and frank, and resemble what lots of Canadians are feeling when it comes to the details of these reports and the quality of work being done by the government in the past couple of years.
I note that yesterday you said, “It's very frustrating and discouraging for the government to know, for many years, that problems exist, that barriers exist, but that little action is taken”. I think these reports are timely right now, because I know, as a member of Parliament with a constituency office, that customer service levels and response times are absolutely collapsing, frankly, as we come out of the pandemic. There were challenges accommodating and adjusting to the pandemic when it started, but as we come out of it and get back to a semblance of normalcy and return to normalcy.... I think of the services we deal with in our office: CRA, Service Canada, IRCC, Veterans Affairs, Passport Canada, NEXUS, the list goes on. We're seeing an absolute collapse and a total unpreparedness for trends and things that are going along.
Some of the observations that I have, just at the high level to your reports, which I appreciate, are how it backs up that spending money is not a result. I think you allude to this in your conclusions and observations in several of your reports. Very often we call for action from the government on addressing, for example, the backlogs for processing claims for veterans. They say that we're spending x number of millions of dollars to address this, and at the end of the day, the frank reality is that we're spending more and now getting less. The value for money and the per capita of this, frankly, is not matching the rhetoric or the responses that we get. We're not seeing leadership. We're not seeing good management, and we're not seeing innovation really happening. It needs to be happening in what we're doing here.
Frankly, I can foreshadow, Ms. Hogan...without prejudicing your future worker decisions on what to study. Look, for example, at NEXUS cards. It's been in the news recently. Our office is dealing with this. There are no plans, no timelines and 300,000 applications backlogged. There's absolute chaos, at three years into the pandemic—let alone adjusting to that type of program during the pandemic. As we return to normal, there's still literally no leadership or plan, or anything.
I want to focus my first round, perhaps, on your report on Veterans Affairs and processing disability claims for veterans. I want to quote here from this report. You mentioned in your press conference and in the report that you were “left with the conclusion that the government has failed to meet a promise that it made to our veterans, that it would take care of them if they were injured in service”. That's a pretty bold statement and, rightfully, an accurate and important statement to understand the context of this.
One of the things that were very frustrating was not only the details of the report confirming what we're hearing from veterans and from constituents across the country, but also the response from the minister and the Department of Veterans Affairs. There was a CBC News article report that said, “The department said it accepted the criticism and recommendations but also blamed delays on a 40 per cent increase in the number of applications across the board and 75 per cent increase in first-time applications.”
Here's what frustrates me, and I'd like to get your comments on this. When preparing and using data and trends when it comes to Veterans Affairs and applications, the federal government should be able to look, for example, at another department—the Department of National Defence—to know the number of Canadians who are serving, who have injuries, their ages and the demographics to understand and be able to prepare and predict when a surge in services is coming.
Could you speak a little bit about the department's ability? Are they doing anything in terms of looking at what future trends in service levels and volumes may be? Is there anything you saw in your work that would suggest they're planning ahead appropriately for this?