Thank you for the question, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Samson, it's always a pleasure.
We have invested a lot of time and money in, I don't know if the term is “upgrading”, but investing and improving the knowledge of our case managers, and I would go further, all of our employees.
The reality is with the influx of money we've received in the last couple of years, we've hired over 460 new employees. These are new positions, new employees, plus an attrition rate of probably between 10% and 15%, so we're probably close to 600 new people joining the department, but there are 460 new positions. We decided to really bring them into this care, compassion, respect environment, so we developed a national training program for our new people where we teach them—I don't know if that's the right term; I don't want to sound degrading in any way—we educate them on our new programs and bring them into this care, compassion, respect environment of giving the benefit of the doubt to the veteran.
They are professionals. They are case managers. They are social workers, nurses. They have the education, but what's important is whether they understand the military culture and our programs. We've been investing a lot, so much so that our more experienced case managers have come back to us and said, “Wait a minute. This is all nice and dandy that you are doing that with the new guys, but what about us? We need this recycling.” So we've embarked since April 2017 on recycling. It's not the same length of training, but it's recycling the people.
When veterans say the case managers don't know about the new programs, I'm always a little concerned because they should.