Thank you, Chair.
Through you to the minister, I want to reflect on the fact that in some of the responses, I've heard you talking about efficiencies of services. I appreciate that, but what concerns me about that is that it's a departmental response to say, “Trying to be ever more efficient”.
The real human concern of many veterans is that efficiency may be impacting in a negative way the services they require to have time and space. Again, a lot of the discussions I'm having with veterans are about how they want to see a department that's more veteran-centric. I hope that is work you will endeavour to do.
I want to touch on women veterans. As you know, the committee is finally studying women veterans. This is the first time it has ever been done in this place, which I think is quite astonishing. We've heard from a lot of women veterans—especially older women veterans who enlisted prior to 2000—who do not have appropriate medical documentation. The reason is that they were really new and there was pressure to not stand out, to be quiet and to not bring forward issues because they were concerned about harassment, bullying and other activities that were intimidating. Of course, there's also the sad history of our forces in terms of sexual misconduct.
The gap has been acknowledged by both DND and CAF. I am really curious about how this is going to be addressed, because so many women veterans are not getting the benefits they deserve because they simply do not have the medical documentation—for no fault of their own.
Retired captain Louise Siew was here from the navy. One of her recommendations really stuck with me, namely, that is to better to support women by giving them the disability benefit claims and just doing an automatic approval process because of the recognition by both DND and CAF. This would make such a big difference for these women, who are put in a place where they have to fight so often.