Veterans Affairs Committee on Oct. 3rd, 2012

[Brad White, Dominion Secretary, Dominion Command, Royal Canadian Legion]

I think a major point of the reduction in wait times at this stage in the game is the availability of the electronic service health records. That has really increased the ability of not only the case manager, but also Legion service officers who have access to CSDN under the network to be able to grab the file. A lot of it was waiting time for the file to get processed, to the individual's needing the file to be able to move forward.

As we've said in the brief that Mr. Moore has given, that is very much a positive step that's happened out of this transformation program to date, and we've decreased the waiting times, we're increasing the flow by having the access to the electronic health service records.

[Dick Harris, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

So the streamlining is effective.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Mr. Robinson, do you want to reply?

[David Robinson]

Just very quickly, I might add that we were living—and we still live, in large measure—in a paper world. If you think about what would be required in terms of mailing paper, mailing paper between offices, between VAC offices, storing paper, retrieving paper, the number of people just handling paper was phenomenal. By starting to move towards electronic processing, we are really making big steps in terms of improving the speed, with fewer hands touching files, with more to come.

[Dick Harris, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Thank you very much.

Do I have more time for questions?

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

A real quick one; you're just about over your time now.

[Dick Harris, Conservative, Cariboo—Prince George, BC]

Let me just make a comment, then.

I appreciate everything that you folks are trying to do for veterans. I know that change doesn't happen overnight, but it appears to me that everything seems to be on a pretty positive path.

Whatever they've done for us, we have to do twice for them: that's right, Mr. Moore.

I think VAC is certainly trying to do that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Zimmer, you have a full five minutes today.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

Yes.

Again, it's an honour to be here, actually. When I was asked to be on the veterans affairs committee, it was just an honour to be asked and to be part of your lives, I guess. For what you've contributed to us and what you've done in the past, it's an honour to be here.

I preface this a little bit cautiously, because I don't want to get into necessarily a partisan argument with Mr. Casey. I only ask this because I think we need a benchmark of where we are now as opposed to where we were pre-2006. I want to put it into context with what's here.

Again, Mr. Moore, we can always do better. I think there's no argument there; we can always do better. Even if it were 99.999%, we could always do that 0.01% better. So I'll give you that.

But I wanted to ask all four of you if you were familiar with the cuts of the former government, with what they were—just an opinion, I guess.

We'll start with Mr. White, if that's possible.

[Brad White]

I'm not in a position to talk about the cuts that any government has made to the veterans program. I'm looking for improvements to the program. I don't think it's necessary to talk about the past.

[Gordon Moore]

The same: we're here to make sure that the veteran is looked after right from the very start, from the very first application that he puts in, right through to the award. We want to make sure that each veteran gets what they deserve. That's the bottom line.

Whether it's the Conservative government, Liberal, or NDP, it doesn't matter. The bottom line is the veteran. If we can get everyone on the same page...then this committee probably wouldn't be here, because we would all be on the same page doing the job that we're supposed to do.

For every veteran who has served this country, I will say again, we owe them big time. I will keep saying that as long as I'm wearing this uniform.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

Agreed.

Mr. Robinson.

[David Robinson]

I'd simply like to say, with regard to the comments of the dominion president, that we are 100% in alignment with his view that our orientation for everything we're doing is to improve services to clients and veterans. It's not a budget initiative. This is about improving services.

It's a very challenging and complex world that we're living in. The number of our clients, sadly, is reducing, so we don't need the infrastructure that we used to have in the department in order to serve our clients. At the same time, they're becoming more complex, and we have to try to move to higher-value work so that we're providing better support to the more complex cases, and stop having people moving paper files around when we should really have them focused out toward providing services to vets and their families.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

Thanks.

Maureen.

[Maureen Sinnott]

I'm not able to comment on any cuts or....

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River, BC]

For the benefit of the room, it was 11%. It was significant.

Again, to go back to the point that I was making, it's not to get into that she-said-he-said; it's more to show how far we've come to this day.

It's kind of speaking to what you guys are saying. The bottom line is that we care about veterans, and I think I say that to demonstrate that we care about veterans and we really put money where our mouth is. I just did that from that perspective.

To move on to another question, in terms of the streamlining—a pilot's-eye view, I guess, looking down at this from a broad perspective—I'd like your opinions on the streamlining of the entire process.

We've heard some already, but I'm more curious about your opinions, Mr. Moore and Mr. White, about the streamlining and how that's going. You've spoken to that somewhat, but can you explain it some more?

[Brad White]

The streamlining process as defined and as ongoing right now in the transformation process is making steps forward. One has to remember that we still have the Pension Act, and now the New Veterans Charter. Those are two very different pieces of legislation under which a very diverse group of people now come.

Case managers at VAC have trouble interpreting the Pension Act and the New Veterans Charter. Our own service officers are dealing with both pieces of legislation to assist the people as they move forward. We're now going to take that type of an information process and put it down to a Service Canada representative. When a veteran calls into Service Canada and says, “What about this situation?”, it will be very difficult for anybody from Service Canada to be able to interpret something out of the Pension Act or the New Veterans Charter and be able to assist the individual. Naturally, the default is that it's going to have to go back to a case manager somewhere in Veterans Affairs to be able to respond to the question. In actual fact, if this is transformation and streamlining, we've got to take an additional step to get right back to where we were before. So there are going to be issues.

A cookie-cutter solution for everybody doesn't work. The age and the diversity of the population that we're dealing with goes from an 18-year-old who's had maybe one or two tours in Afghanistan up to a 100-plus-year-old who's been in World War II. So that complexity goes all the way through.

Even with today's modern veterans, if you want to call them modern veterans, you can get an individual who's down on his luck and is couch-surfing. Does he have access to the Internet? Probably not. So where is he going to get his access point through to?

There are all sorts of parameters here that haven't been addressed yet. So that's my question.

[The Chair, Conservative, Greg Kerr]

Thank you very much, Mr. White. We're quite a bit over.

That ends round one. We'll go to round two, which is a four-minute round. We've been a little generous here because we have only one group of witnesses today, so we'll try to be reasonable.

I understand, Ms. Turmel, that you will start round two.

[Nycole Turmel, NDP, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I would like to talk a bit about the service. You said that it would be improved and that you would be cutting down on red tape. I would also like to talk about the 600 Service Canada outlets that you mentioned. You are aware that people often come and see us, their members of Parliament, because they have knocked on every door without getting an answer. We are getting more and more of those visits from veterans, and 90% of the cases are very complex.

Let me give you an example. A lady came to see us because her father, a veteran, had died. She had been denied funeral expenses and she was trying to find out why. She came to see us; we have tried to contact the appropriate people, but no one has called us back. We have no information. What do we tell that person? What answers do we give her? And we are in a major centre, not in some remote area.

[David Robinson]

I'm not sure that I have a good answer for your specific case.

[Nycole Turmel, NDP, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Sorry. It's one specific case, but those that I'm talking about are all the same. They are really complex and we don't get an answer.

[David Robinson]

I would like to go back and check in my own department, because I don't know the answer to this and there could very well be a good answer. There could very well be a service that's provided to members of Parliament that I'm not aware of. Other than that, we have our general inquiry lines to Veterans Affairs.

But I might like to take that one back, because I think there might be an answer that I'm not aware of.

[Nycole Turmel, NDP, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

My next question is for Mr. Moore.

We know that there have been cuts. I have been told that 250 case manager positions have been eliminated across the country. Those are the people making house calls and providing services directly to veterans. They understand their situation very well. They can detect changes and help the families, who do not always have the time or the ability, to be able to pick up on the changes and to come to terms with them.

Do you see a difference? Are the improvements that have been announced really a lot better? Instead of trying to cut down on red tape, should they not also be looking at having service centres and improving the service that regional case managers provide, especially because they know those remote areas as well as the veterans' rights?

[Brad White]

I will answer in English, if I may. It will be a lot better for both of us.

The real issue when we're doing cuts like this is that we've been told the people will be offered a chance to go into a different place. Maybe somebody will become a case manager and receive the training to become a case manager. We haven't seen this yet, so we're waiting as well to see how this service delivery is going to develop.

Take, for example, the Sydney office in Cape Breton. We've been told that it's going to close in 2014. We've been told that those people have been offered positions down in the Halifax region in the same type of work, and we're hoping that they get more case managers.

The issue is to get more case managers to be able to deal with the people directly. That's what we want to see. We haven't seen it yet, and we haven't seen how that's going to develop. We're waiting to see how that will develop and where those people will be repositioned, retrained, and reused to be able to serve veterans.

So we're watching too.

[Nycole Turmel, NDP, Hull—Aylmer, QC]

Thank you.

Sylvain, do you want to ask another question?