Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Anthony offers his apologies for the technical difficulties, but he will certainly be attentively watching the proceedings today.
Thank you, Jean-Guy, and thank you committee members for your time today.
One of the key metrics used to assess service delivery performance and to serve as a proxy for fairness is disability and benefit application wait times. However, to our knowledge there is no standard definition of what fair service means.
In the view of the association, fair service means equitable service, and it must also mean equitable outcomes. Having good clear data is essential in this, and it is incredibly difficult to locate disaggregated data to compare results, which committee members have noted during the course of this study.
Transparent, clear, readily available data can help determine whether there is more to the wait time story and whether it's a story that needs to be told in it's entirety. For example, we know that there are differences in wait times for francophone and anglophone veterans, but what we heard for the first time from the veterans ombudsman and the deputy veterans ombudsman when they appeared at this committee on Friday, March 22nd is that differences are compounded. Francophones wait longer, and women wait longer, but francophone women wait the longest.
Uneven service delivery is not just about how long some claims are backlogged, it is about why these claims are delayed or backlogged, identifying the differences and addressing them with equity in mind. Uneven service delivery and lack of fairness are symptoms of institutional and structural biases and are the result of the failure to respond to the complex intersectional nature of the human beings involved.
A veteran's identity is relevant to experiences during service, including service-related illness and injury, the outcomes they're likely to experience as a veteran, and the care and support they may require. It's also relevant when it comes to military and veteran health research.
We've made a number of recommendations in the brief that we've submitted, but it really comes down to data and transparent reporting to define and understand where the lack of fairness is worse; understanding that what we're seeing are symptoms of systemic inequity, both upstream and downstream; research and co-ordination; and ensuring that veterans have a voice in the services and the delivery of those services.