Thanks for the invitation to again appear before you.
Appearing with me today, as usual, is my colleague the deputy chair, retired Lieutenant-Colonel Jacques Bouchard.
Jacques and I come to our work from uniform service. What motivates us daily in our work is having served with those who have suffered. We are very proud of the work we do and we're very proud of both the members and staff in P.E.I. who serve veterans every day.
As you know, the role of the board is essentially to provide veterans an opportunity to appeal disability claims where they are dissatisfied with the VAC decision. Thus, the caseload of the board is directly related to the workload of VAC.
Generally, the board is asked to review about 10% of VAC decisions. That goes up and down depending on the year. If VAC has a backlog, that backlog will eventually flow downstream to the board at some point. As a result of the significant increase in VAC processing decisions in the last few years, the board has seen approximately a 30% increase in the number of applications coming to the board.
The increased workload in the past few years has challenged our capacity to provide veterans with timely hearings. In 2018-19, the board had essentially 1,500 pending cases. Now, in 2022-23, we have 6,100 pending cases. This is in spite of the fact that over the same time period we have almost tripled the number of hearings that we have had. In 2018-19, we heard about 2,000 cases a year. Last year, we heard 5,200. This year, we will hear probably 6,000 cases.
The result of that is that veterans are waiting longer for their decisions. They are waiting up to almost a year—about 400 days.
We are pleased that the minister has supported the board's request for additional funding to address this growing backlog. As a result, in budget 2022 the board received two years of temporary funding in the amount of $6.2 million. While that may not seem like much, you have to recognize that we operate on a $11-million operating budget, so it is a significant investment in our service. In addition, the Government of Canada has committed to providing the board with additional funding that will support a long-term strategy to reduce the wait times.
With these resources, we've hired additional staff and we are in the process of hiring additional members to conduct more hearings. We believe this will provide a significant opportunity to reduce that backlog. However, we believe that in the absence of significant procedural changes, additional resources alone will not solve the backlog problem.
In this regard, I would ask deputy chair Jacques Bouchard to briefly outline the steps we have taken to increase access to hearings for veterans and to reduce the administrative burden.