Veterans Affairs committee  Good morning, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. Thank you for the opportunity to participate in this session. My name is Elizabeth Douglas, and I am the director general of service delivery and program management at Veterans Affairs Canada. Today I am joined by my c

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you. I'm going to turn to my colleagues Anne-Marie Pellerin and Robert Cormier, as both have experience with transition interviews and will be able to assist with your question.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you very much for the question. First, there has been a backlog, and we are working with our colleagues at DND and CAF to make improvements in this area. There has been significant improvement over the past year. Around this time last year, it took approximately 35 days

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, I'd like to add to that. To your point, we have in the last year put in place a streamlined, evidence-informed decision-making model for four areas. Those areas are hearing loss, tinnitus, PTSD, and MSK, or musculoskeletal. The reason we have done this is that they represen

Veterans Affairs committee  I'm going to turn that question over to my colleagues. Thank you.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you for that, and thank you for the question. In terms of transition and financial advice, I am going to turn it over to Anne-Marie Pellerin, who can provide more information, but I want to stress one of the points that the brigadier-general has just made. Part of the VAC

Veterans Affairs committee  Anne-Marie, do you want to take that as well?

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you for the question. We certainly realized at VAC that we want to continue to improve the transition process. That is also why we have seamless transition as one of our priorities, and why we have the CAF-VAC seamless transition working group and task force. It is somethi

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you for that. We have not been assessing whether they actually understand what we have been saying, but we try to work with them to make sure there is a sense that they know what programs and benefits they are entitled to.

Veterans Affairs committee  As stated earlier, one of the things that we are doing is this post-release follow-up. We're doing it with those veterans who were originally deemed to be minimally at risk. However, what we find out is that quite often veterans don't either self-identify—as you're pointing out—o

Veterans Affairs committee  I'm sorry.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you. As previously noted, there has been an improvement over the past year, and there has been a working group looking into this to try to identify what those barriers are. In terms of the length of time it took to transfer records, we have gone down from 35 days a year ag

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, we do have the medical expertise.

Veterans Affairs committee  I would just like to state that this is outside of my purview. We do have a director general who is responsible for adjudication, and I would like to refer these questions to him, perhaps at another date, or come back with answers to your questions.

Veterans Affairs committee  The reason the banking information and the GCKey are there is the way in which the Government of Canada can secure online information. It is a whole-of-government solution that has been put forward by Treasury Board Secretariat. That said, we too recognize that veterans are stru