That's a good question and I'm glad you asked it. It's one of the messages that I really want to get out.
What you're referring to here, Mr. Gaudet, is the veterans independence program. That program is designed for women like your mother who require that bit of help. This feeds back to one of the questions I had from Mr. Stoffer. Under the old system of pensions and how benefits flowed to veterans, it was always predicated on the fact that a veteran had to have a disability in order for this to be passed on to the veteran's loved ones. So in your father's circumstance, your father would have had to have been an eligible veteran on a veteran's disability pension for your mother to qualify for that service. That makes absolutely no sense.
One of the raucous debates we've had around this place and the back and forth that you sometimes see in the House of Commons is on the enhancement to the VIP program. We brought some changes into that program, Mr. Gaudet, to make it more fair to those women like your mother.
I've had this discussion with veterans. I tell the famous story of a veteran whom I met in Arnprior, Ontario. He had served and was wounded in the war. I said, “Well, you must be one of our clients.” He said, ”No, I'm not one of your clients. I had a great marriage, a great business, and I've never asked for anything because I didn't need it, so I didn't ask.” But he would be entitled to it. I said, “What will happen when you pass away is your wife will not be entitled to those VIP benefits.” It doesn't make any sense, does it?
So you can have a 100-year-old woman who needs a bit of help, but because her husband wasn't receiving a benefit from the department and he had never applied for a pension, he couldn't get it. So we debated this and discussed how we would fix it, and we brought about some changes to it, Roger. And the changes aren't at the level that you would like to see them and I would like to see them, to be very honest with you. We brought it in and we identified those widows, because today we have 75,000 veterans who receive VIP, in total, and out of that we have about 30,000 widows. So we have 100,000 people who receive VIP in the country.
So getting down to answering your questions on that...I think this is why the chair is not interfering with my long answer, because it's an interesting answer and it's a good question. The chairman is being very generous to both of us, Mr. Gaudet.
We brought in some changes to this because women just like your mother deserve help too. So the changes we brought in, Roger, make it easier for these widows to receive the VIP benefit that they otherwise would not have been entitled to under the system that existed a couple of years ago. We brought it in so that if they are frail and live below a certain level of income, regardless of whether a husband received the benefit or any kind of a pension entitlement, they now would qualify. But the benchmark or the ceiling is quite low. So over time we hope to bring that up and have it enhanced so that we can bring more widows into that same system, because we did allocate around $28 million for that program. That's one area where I think we have to pay close attention in the coming years. There's going to be more of those women like your mother, because women in our society tend to live longer, and some of the men who are veterans are in poor health because of the service. When they pass on, we're going to have many of those widows in the coming years who are going to need that bit of extra help.
What we tried to do, and I believe we have done it, is design the programs so they can be built upon without any major restructuring. We're looking into our crystal ball and hoping that down the road we can improve it a bit more.
It's quite interesting. Your mother is 100 years of age and she might be getting to the point in her life, because of circumstances, where she will need that help. Hopefully we'll be there to help her.