Thank you, Mr. Shipley.
Everyone in the room, every member of Parliament, in a way, is almost an ombudsman for veterans, aren't they? I'm always amazed at how many letters I get, as the Minister of Veterans Affairs, from individual members of Parliament. There is a connection between members of Parliament and veterans for the very obvious reason that they fought for the democracy and freedoms we enjoy as one of the best examples of democracy in the free world. So there is a natural connection to members of Parliament and obviously between members of Parliament and our legions and veterans groups, because they work with our veterans very closely, as well.
I think that really goes back to the new Veterans Charter. We work through that. At Veterans Affairs, we have extremely talented and very dedicated individuals with huge caseloads who are trying to work through a system....
I believe I am correct in this number: I believe that five years ago we had approximately 9,000 applications a year before Veterans Affairs. Prior to the new charter, we had 35,000 applications per year before Veterans Affairs. That is just an astronomical increase. It's a 400% increase in applications. All those people are human beings, and there are families attached to those decisions. It shows you just how difficult it is to manage all that.
On top of that, we have an appeal process that truly is the best in the world. If a veteran is denied, we have an internal review process within the department to take another look at it. If we go to the appeal board, we have pension advocates--professional lawyers--who will represent the veterans when they appear before the tribunal, the quasi-judicial body.
So we have an appeal mechanism unlike any in the country. I guess if we were living in a perfect world, we wouldn't have as many appeals as we have, or the answers would be quicker and more forthcoming. But there have to be checks and balances in the system.
That was one of the things that drove the government to move to a new charter, to a new way of dealing with veterans, because in the old system, the only doorway for veterans to qualify for any level of service for anything else that might come their way was to have a pensionable condition.
I think one of the failings under the old charter was that we didn't concentrate on the wellness of the veteran and his or her family. A veteran might have been successful in getting a 20% pension, if you will. What we should have been doing, in my opinion, in hindsight--but hindsight is always 20/20, and we learn as we go along--is more than just hand out a pension. It is like the old axiom: give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.
That's a little of the philosophy behind the new charter. What we're saying is that the age of a veteran coming out of the Canadian Forces is 36. That means that by definition, he has about 29 years of work ahead of him or her in the workforce.
Under the new charter we're really addressing, Mr. Shipley, that frustration level, because a 20% pension, and I'm not trying to be crass and I'm not saying this in a pejorative way, is almost a prescription for poverty. We would see a lot of these veterans coming in and their only hope of getting ahead was to get more pension and get the pension from 20% to 40%, 50%, 60% or 70%.
If you talk to any of these veterans, they say that the best thing we could have done for them was provide them and their families with an education to get beyond where they were. There are some veterans that can't. We know that, and we have the permanent disability program for them. We have all those types of programs for veterans who can't be rehabilitated, if you will, and are totally disabled.
For the average veteran, I believe the disability award or the pensionable range was somewhere around 30%. You could ask yourself, “Could I live on that amount of money”? Well, the answer is no. So under the new charter there is emphasis on the family. For example, if somehow the veteran himself or herself could not be retrained, that same retraining and the funding to do that would be extended to the spouse of the veteran. I guess the fancy socialists would call it the holistic approach, but it's really a family approach to dealing with veterans, because it's more than just the veterans; it's their families. I hope over time this will ease some of the burdens that are placed on families.
I can remember coming to Veterans Affairs and sitting beside Brian Ferguson. I was pushing him hard on some of the same questions you're giving me. He said, “You know, we'll never give up on a veteran.” We will never give up on a veteran. We're going to do everything we can for that veteran and their family. So if this fails, we'll try something else.
Going back to Mr. Perron's question, and I guess Mr. Thibault's--it's sort of a theme here today--as many of you know, when we launched the new charter it was right here with the Prime Minister on April 6, sort of the kickoff of the new charter. Roméo Dallaire was in the room that day, and he was talking about building this bridge. I had met with him two days prior to the launch, and it was one of the best meetings I could have had. It was one of those days when I had a lot on my mind and was wondering whether I was doing the right thing or not. He said, “What you're doing, Mr. Thompson, is building a bridge that will transition us from military life to civilian life.” He thought that bridge was well constructed and well engineered, and said, “You're not going to take just the veteran across that bridge; you're going to take their family, which is something that has never occurred in the past.”
I don't want to run on and take up all of your time, the chair's time, or the committee's time, but I think that's really fundamental to what we're doing at Veterans Affairs. It's sort of a new approach, knowing that the old charter had sort of done its deed, if you will. If you examine some of the programs that existed following World War II and how successful they were, I guess with time they kind of wore themselves out.
I'm pretty confident that what we're doing is the right thing. At the end of the day, we're going to have better programs for our veterans and better opportunities to get them through some of the difficulties they experience.
As I often say in my speeches, it's not just bullets and bombs that affect our soldiers. We're talking about some of the stresses they're under when they're in extremely high-risk missions. Whether it's our RCMP officers in some of the streets of our downtowns, as witnessed last week in Toronto, or a young soldier in Afghanistan, the stress of that type of work and being away from your family is something that most of us can't imagine. So when they come back, we'd better have a wide range of tools and support systems to help them and their families. That's why I feel pretty good about what we're doing.
As we say, we're not going to get it perfect, but what we have is an open book. We're going to depend on people like yourselves to help us come up with better ways of dealing with it. I guess what I'm saying is I feel pretty good about it.