Mr. Chair, Honourable Committee Members, thank you for inviting us here today.
Our Canadian Veterans deserve the best possible services and support that we can provide to them and their families. And our number one priority in serving them is reducing processing times for disability benefit applications and making quality and accurate decisions.
Over the last five to six years, we've experienced a 40% increase in disability benefit applications, including an increase of more than 75% in first applications. Despite this, between April 2020 and February of this year, the team has reduced the overall number of pending applications by 36%—in other words, from 48,000 to just over 31,000—and the number of claims beyond our 16-week service standard by 44%, from 22,000 to just over 12,000.
I want to thank the members of this committee who have quite rightly focused on timely and effective decisions for veterans, with an additional emphasis on barriers and gaps for groups such as females and francophones. We've made measurable progress in addressing the turnaround times for applications from females and francophone veterans. For example, as of December 2021, we've reduced the average turnaround time for female applicants by 6.9 weeks and the average turnaround time for francophones by 3.2 weeks.
Two years ago, I was named Director General responsible for the team that processes disability benefit applications. At that time, our team was faced with a workload of disability claims that had never been higher, and a global pandemic had just begun.
The one constant during those early months of uncertainty was the dedication and devotion of the team. They understood the importance of continuing to get decisions out the door, and their productivity steadily increased as we brought more staff in the door.
With the recent government announcement of $139 million to extend term funding for another two years, we can maintain this momentum and achieve our goal of processing applications within the service standard.
There are a few other highlights I'd like to share. We stood up a team dedicated to processing applications from women to eliminate inequalities in the turnaround times between female and male applicants. Likewise, we increased our French and bilingual capacity and are now positioned to better support our bilingual and French applicants. We have a dedicated unit that prioritized and processed over a thousand applications from military sexual trauma survivors. More than $105 million in pain and suffering compensation has been paid to them. We were able to make those decisions within 30 days on average.
We are working to automate some of the manual steps in our processes, which will alleviate repetitive tasks, improve information sharing and, most importantly, improve the client experience.
We engaged directly with Veterans. In May of last year, through our consultation platform called Let’s Talk Veterans, we consulted with Veterans about the disability benefit process. The feedback from close to one thousand Veterans was tremendous and has helped us zero in on the very specific challenges for Veterans. We are already using this information to make changes.
We are building tools for our decision-makers to connect veteran injuries to service faster and more consistently. These tools are developed with a GBA+ lens to support consistent, equitable and transparent decisions that are inclusive of sex and gender and reflect the most up-to-date medical research.
All this to say, we are really at a pivotal moment. We know there is a lot more work to do, but we have come a long way, and we are well positioned to get the work done.
Before I close, I'd like to leave you with this message that I recently received from one of our team members: “As a Veteran myself, I have said since the early days of working at Veterans Affairs Canada that I feel like I am truly at home. I get to tap into my experience in the Canadian Armed Forces and also bring to the role the skills I developed in my career. I am happy for the veterans we are serving. I know we are making a difference. I hear it on the phone and I see it in the numbers. It’s wonderful that we now get to continue to make a difference.”
Thank you.