Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the question.
It is true that our system is hard to navigate. There are a lot of policies, programs, and processes. There are a couple of things we are doing to address that.
The first thing we've undertaken is something called the service delivery review, which is looking at how we can simplify our processes and improve transition, because it is a mandate of the minister, as associate minister of National Defence, to eliminate that seam to the extent we can. However, more concretely, what we are doing, and we're piloting it right now, is looking at something we're calling “guided support”, but I like your term of “navigator”.
What we're realizing is that when a soldier gets ready to release, they don't know our programs. They may start talking to a military case manager and they may start talking to one of our case managers, but they don't know the programs. This guided support would be meeting with a Veterans Affairs employee during transition, and that employee would go through their entire file, what we think they're entitled to, and even trying to get the cases adjudicated before they're release from the armed forces.
It does not mean they would not come back five, 10, or 50 years later. We have people who show up 50 years after release, but at least if you're moving to a certain part of the country and you have special needs and maybe you'd have a hard time receiving the specialized medical help you need, you would know if you eligible for a disability or what type of employment opportunities there are. That's why we're calling it “guided support” or the “navigator”. It's to get them better suited for transition, because we know that 27% of the people transitioning have a hard time. Most of them transition well, but 27% do not.
The reason we're concentrating on this is that we've concentrated a lot on the medically releasing individuals. We've been doing a lot of work in transition in eliminating the seam for the medically releasing individuals. We just realized, because our researchers had done some work on it, that of that 27%, 60% are actually non-medically released people who are having a hard time. We've been concentrating on the medically releasing, and now we have to make sure we're taking care of the non-medically.
Most of them want to be released with their head high, no stigma, but then they realize when they get into the Canadian population, it's a little different.