Mr. Chair, I know the time is limited, so I'll walk through this briefing fairly quickly. In the interest of the chair's health and safety, I've put away my laser pointer. I'll have to just point at some of the slides here.
I'd like to start by reminding you about the four enhancements made to the new Veterans Charter through the Enhanced New Veterans Charter Act in October 2011.
While these enhancements were a good first step to improving support to veterans, there are a number of shortcomings with the new Veterans Charter that continue to affect injured or ill veterans and their families.
We broadened our review of the NVC and found that there were three specific areas most at issue for veterans. Mr. Parent mentioned the three areas: financial support, vocational rehabilitation and assistance, and support to families. There are specific shortcomings in each of these three areas. I'll cover them briefly in the next slides. Then I'll wrap up my presentation by listing the positive effects that can be achieved by addressing these shortcomings.
One of our objectives in reviewing the new Veterans Charter was to link shortcomings with actual veterans who are affected by the shortcomings. There are a lot of numbers on this slide, but I want to focus on the large numbers in bold to give you a sense of how we interpreted the statistics that are available to the department.
Taking, for example, the problem we identified with economic financial support after the age of 65, we started by looking at how many veterans there are in Canada, around 696,000; how many Veterans Affairs Canada clients there are, about 136,000; how many of these are Canadian Armed Forces clients, around 76,000; how many of these Canadian Armed Forces clients are totally and permanently incapacitated and cannot engage in suitable gainful employment, 1,428; and of these 1,428, how many are potentially at risk of living their retirement years with insufficient financial means, and the number is 406. We walked our way through that.