No. As I said in an answer earlier, in comparison to spending when we formed a government in 2006, we're spending on average about $700 million more, but we're spending it in different ways.
All parliamentarians, including Mr. Stoffer, who I think has been here longer than anyone else, has seen the attention paid to mental health. When I was in the Canadian Armed Forces, there was very little discussion of operational stress injuries or post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact, as I said, the first operational stress injury clinic opened by the Canadian Armed Forces wasn't until 2002.
This is an area where we've been expending a lot of time and resources because it's a new area. If somebody gets support with a mental health condition or injury, they can get back on the road to wellness. We need to reduce the stigma. These clinics didn't exist even 15 years ago. We'll have 26 by the end of this year and we will need to do more. We're spending more but we're spending in new ways. We're trying to build flexibility into the system.
As someone who comes from the private sector, I say that our department has a challenge we're rising to meet. We have seriously injured veterans who are clients of Veterans Affairs in their late twenties and early thirties as well as clients in their mid to late nineties. They have different needs and they expect to draw their services from Veterans Affairs in different ways. It's an immense challenge and that's why we're trying to build flexibility into the system by expanding access points through Service Canada for basic support, offering more home visits, and developing the My VAC online account, as well as mental wellness apps for PTSD and operational stress. Older veterans—and I've even heard some parliamentarians—might mock an app for a phone, but the reality is that a lot of our young veterans from the Afghan war have never had a bank book in their lives. They've done everything on their smartphones. We have to appeal to what they expect in terms of service delivery.
It's a challenge, but we have an incredible team and we're going to try to meet that challenge with flexibility