Coming into the department, especially an organization that had lost so many folks, and with a head office away from the national capital in a small community.... For a headquarters to go from 2,000 folks to 1,100 folks was a shock, and it kind of goes to this notion of a perfect storm. Mr. Casey is living right there in the community and he knows what it was like. People were scared to make a decision. As the chief of the defence staff, I was watching this from my side of the Rideau and saying, “Oh my goodness. What's going on?”
Coming into the job, I wanted to make sure that everybody in the department felt empowered to make the right decisions. I had the notion of delegating authority, empowering people to make a decision and then trusting them to do it right. I still remember back in November 2014 visiting our office here in Ottawa and confirming when I visited Halifax and confirming when I visited Ville de Québec the fact that our folks were almost shell-shocked because of this onslaught, this tsunami of mental health injured veterans, and yet at the same time, there seemed to be difficulty in getting the message back to head office that was going through the shock wave.
Having served in a number of operations, I came up with the line, “The further you are from the sound of the guns, the less you understand.” I came up with that one in Baghdad. The same holds true in our department. Our front-line workers who are social workers, occupational therapists and psychologists are meeting with veterans every day, looking them in the eye, looking the family in the eye, and they're trying to find a way to say yes. They are working in the grey zone, and they're seeing the reality, whereas the further you are from the veteran in this case the more things become binary. You're working in policy or you're working in finance. Not to disparage my colleagues, but that's the reality of it.
We had the notion of care, compassion and respect. Our mission was to care. If we have to default in decision-making, it's to compassion, and we will always respect the veterans. The reality is that if folks default to compassion, we will support them. Again, we have to follow legislation and regulation and so on, but it empowers people to make decisions.
We think about where we were in 2014, and we just found out recently that Veterans Affairs Canada is in the Forbes top 100 employers. What was the number? Was it 74? It was in the top 100, and so we've come a long way. We see again that our employees are feeling that additional folks have come on and assisted them.
We are dealing with the backlog. In the town halls that I have done recently and the town halls that the minister has done, we have heard about the backlog and we're pulling out the stops. But in terms of empowering employees to make the right decisions for veterans and to nudge them into well-being, this is tough. Some of these folks don't want to be nudged. We need to nudge them towards purpose. We need to nudge them towards their mental and physical well-being. We need to provide family support around them. That takes a lot of care and compassion.