Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that very much.
As the minister said earlier today, and as I'm sure all committee members agree, the existence of the backlog is unfortunate. It's unacceptable. And 100%, we all need to work on fixing the backlog. That's what this study is all about.
I would say that, at best, Mr. Brassard's motion is entirely premature before the study is complete. At worst, it is partisan political posturing at its worst. I've intervened in the last Parliament and again in this Parliament to point out how this backlog arrived. As Parliamentary Secretary Samson has pointed out, let's recall that it's a direct result of what happened the last time the Conservative Party was the government. It applied partisan politics to Veterans Affairs in an attempt to balance the budget on the eve of a federal election, eliminating 1,000 jobs, closing nine regional offices, slashing tens and tens of millions of dollars from the VAC budget. That's what caused these backlogs.
Contrast that with this government, which has invested billions of dollars back into our veterans and is now spending $2 billion per year more on veterans than the Conservative government did in 2014-15, and the slew of new supportive programs that we've enacted for veterans. Because of these new programs, demand for the programs is higher than ever, which has the effect of compounding the Conservative-created backlog. In fact, a measure of the success of our new programs is that, according to VAC, in the time since we formed the government, the number of applications received grew by 40%.
I might remind the opposition of what famously happened when the Obamacare website was launched in 2013. The site was overwhelmed with applications. The site crashed. This wasn't an indication that Obamacare was flawed; it was quite the opposite. The website crash was an indication of the success of the program that was finally invested in after a period of conservative budget cuts in that country.
The success of our government's VAC programs and the demand that success has created is why we are rehiring employees who were dismissed and reinvesting money that was slashed under the Conservative government.
Mr. Chair, if Mr. Brassard would like to proceed with his motion, I'd like to propose the following amendment to his motion. If it's in order, I'd like to read the amendment now.