Thank you very much, Mr. Chicoine.
I enjoy sitting on this committee. You've been here since my time here, and I appreciate that.
I made two specific announcements, one at CFB Valcartier, Quebec City, in relation to at least 100 case managers. It will be more than that, but you've hit the nail on the head. I'm getting final Treasury Board approval for the exact number, but it will be greater, hopefully quite a bit greater, than 100. It's the same with the benefit adjudicators. I've used a minimum floor number, but there will be more hired over the coming months.
Going back to the case managers, we are going to try to see where there's additional acute need throughout the country and build in more flexibility to how case managers are deployed. In my announcement I said we're going from an average ratio of 1:40 of case manager to clients and we'll be going down to 1:30, but we're going to try to build in flexibility.
The benefit adjudicators are directly related to what we learned from the Auditor General. As you said, there were some unacceptable delays in the processing of disability payments for those with mental injuries from service. That was unacceptable. What's interesting to note is that we asked the Auditor General to look specifically at this issue: were our investments meeting our targets? In terms of the processing of benefit claims, they were not. So our hiring of those adjudicators will try to bring down the wait times identified by the Auditor General to meet the departmental targets. Once we get through that backlog, we can then get to a point where we can start meeting our targets of having a disability claim processed within six to eight weeks.
The Auditor General did say that vocational rehabilitation: the retraining, the re-education, that sort of thing, was proceeding okay. But in terms of the financial benefit processing, we were not meeting our expectations. All these positions will be hired in the coming months and there will be more than 100 in both categories.