Mr. Speaker, I am always happy to have the last word.
I want to take these last few minutes to talk about veterans in this budget. There are over 15,000 veterans waiting for their disability claims to be processed. Last year we know that the Parliamentary Budget Officer did an in-depth review of this wait time, and I want to be clear: it is up to two years for some of our veterans.
The feedback was very simple. The just-over 300 people who VAC has hired temporarily need to be put in place permanently. To address this backlog, even more need to be hired very rapidly. We are already behind. With the government opposing the Parliamentary Budget Officer's report, I am not sure when these veterans are actually going to see the resources they rightly deserve delivered to them. The budget does list $29 million for VAC to hire permanent case workers, but this is a reannouncement of money set aside in budget 2018.
Now we have the budget offering veterans yet another program to fill in the gap. The veterans I hear from are very clear. They are tired of new programs. What they want is simple: one case worker who stays with them. They want to call that one person who knows their file and understands their situation, their family and the situation they are in, so they do not have to keep repeating themselves, starting over from the beginning.
This budget would provide $140 million for this program to fill in the gap, but I have a lot of questions. Will this new program simply be available to everyone who is stuck on the backlog of the disability claim? If it can do that, why can they not just approve the original claim and make the actual resources available, instead of another patchwork program? Are we just going to see another program that has to be applied for and takes a really long time to process, putting people on another list, waiting?
Another important gap in the budget is that there is absolutely nothing to deal with the “marriage after 60” clause. The gold-digger clause was created in the early 1900s to prevent women from marrying older veterans and getting their pensions when they died. The reality is that this has always been unfair and very sexist. Many veterans live well into their 80s or more, and their loving partners care for them. I think most Canadians support love when it happens, and we should respect that. We now know that some veterans are living in poverty because they married after 60 and are giving up part of their current pension to put aside for the future. Why are we punishing veterans for getting married at any age?
I want to remind everyone in the House that the RCMP is included in this. Recently I spoke with the RCMP's veterans association and heard loud and clear that this issue is urgent and needs to be dealt with now, so I hope this gets on the Order Paper for the minister very quickly, and I want to thank members for allowing me these very few minutes to talk about how underserved our veterans are, and how the government needs to do so much better.