I went back to my staff and asked whether we could come up with some estimate of the number of calls that might be transferred, i.e., of hot calls from the ombudsman.
It's virtually impossible to give a number, because the ombudsman's staff, as I testified, has complete access to the telephone directory of the department and of the experts. I can confirm the number of 375 calls that we know we responded to in a more official capacity, but if I were to give a number here, it would be no more than a guesstimate. I think that's probably not particularly useful to members.
These are occurring on an ongoing basis. That was the whole premise, that the ombudsman has access to the full staff of the department. To put it in perspective, we have about 125 agents who operate through our national call centre alone and about another 75 people who work in our operations and approval. It wouldn't be a good number, and I'd rather say I don't have a statistic than provide a number that in fact may be off-base.
With respect to the issue of “no fixed address”, I went back and we had a discussion about it. It's not specifically coded. To determine how many we have, we would have to manually go through the 220,000 on the database. The triggers are such things as that various addresses are known to the area counsellors to be, for example, missions and/or residences. In that regard, I can tell you that in some cases, because of the exceptional circumstances of some veterans, their cheques.... We try to send them through direct deposit, but in a very small number of cases, the cheques are delivered to the district office, and the client will come in to the district office to pick them up. We usually try to do that as we're helping to bridge them. In some cases, because of their circumstances, they're not able to open an account in a bank, as you and I would know it.
I wanted, Mr. Chairman, first, to provide a clarification so that the sequence of events was clear, and second, to provide the statistics that had been requested at the last meeting.
Thank you.