I'd be pleased to. Thank you.
Over the last few years, we haven't had a major shift in the number of employees in the department. What we have done, though, over the last number of years, beginning with our pre-transformation work, which we called our “modernization”, was to begin to move resources to the areas of highest need. This meant in some cases that....
As we looked at returning veterans from Afghanistan, we realized that we had to shift some of our resources to the areas where they were deciding to live when released from the military. This led to a couple of things.
First of all, we increased our case managers across the country by 20, and particularly focused on those bases that had the highest activity. In this case we're speaking about Halifax, Petawawa, Valcartier, and Edmonton.
Beyond that, we began to see other shifts. We spoke about one of them at this committee before—namely, the establishment with DND of our integrated personnel support centres. We shifted 100 employees who were working in our district offices and we put them, co-located with DND, in 24 sites across the country. You can imagine what a benefit that was to releasing members when they could walk onto the base that was closest to them and not only meet with the DND case manager but at the same time be introduced to their new VAC case manager.
So that was a shift that we began, and really, it's fundamental to our transformation story. Our shift means that we need to put people, our people, where they're needed most.
Going forward, as we look at the coming years, we have two things that we have to be very cognizant of. Number one, as David has mentioned, our overall number of veterans is going to decline. Number two, we have to modernize. We have to update. We have to become a technological department.
With both of these shifts, we're going to see some changes in our overall employee numbers. You've seen the numbers recently in the media. The department, through transformation, is going to be reducing by 550 employees, approximately, and through budget 2012 there'll be about an additional 250.
That's all about making sure the department is the right size, but it's also about seeing the changes that are coming to us through technology put in place. That will allow us to achieve some streamlining, reduce the red tape, and make it easier for veterans.