Finance committee  Good evening, and thank you for the opportunity to be here. On April 1, 2018, the education and training benefit was introduced. The ETB is a taxable benefit that provides up to $40,960 in funding for veterans with at least six years, or 2,191 authorized paid days, of Canadian A

Finance committee  Currently, we've received 4,540 applications. We have approved 2,353 of those applications. In terms of the number of supplementary reservists, we really don't know how many are going to come in. This is a new program area for us, but the number of supplementary reservists was c

Finance committee  All of the qualifications in terms of the days are based on the CAF's superannuation numbers. It is CAF that actually calculates this. We are hoping that is not an issue, but we do direct anyone who is applying to go back to CAF to get those days.

Finance committee  Thank you.

Veterans Affairs committee  Yes, certainly. Thank you for the question. One thing I would hope to get across is that we at VAC are continuously looking at and take very seriously concerns and problems that have been raised by veterans as to our programs since 2006, the period of time when our new veterans

Veterans Affairs committee  Improvements that I see? One of the first is in applications. We have a heck of a lot of applications at Veterans Affairs. We would like to go to one application. What we would like to do is ensure that a veteran or a family member provides us information once, and then instead

Veterans Affairs committee  I do, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to do so. I would suggest that VAC certainly recognizes that we need to do more in terms of service delivery and service delivery renewal. To that very end, we've had a service delivery renewal exercise under way over the past 1

Veterans Affairs committee  There are none that I'm aware of.

Veterans Affairs committee  I think that those are two separate questions.

Veterans Affairs committee  I would say that there are probably areas where some senior managers do meet their goals and maybe some where they do not meet their goals, but those are different from measurable outcomes and how we measure performance and provide metrics around our programs.

Veterans Affairs committee  First, as you mentioned, METS was run by Canada Company, which is a private organization. We also felt that they did incredibly good work and we are saddened to see that they are closing. In terms of the services they offered, the services that Agilec went out to tender for and

Veterans Affairs committee  I would have to go back to find out that information, but what I can share with you is that this is a contract run by Public Services and Procurement Canada and ourselves. We were looking for and had a statement of work that was based upon career counselling, upon how you provide

Veterans Affairs committee  Again, we will look into the statement of work as to what was required, but we have full confidence in the way the contracting process was run, the way it was tendered, and the way the company was selected.

Veterans Affairs committee  I can speak to the backlog. The backlog is solely for disability adjudication for our disability award or disability pension. I think this is a very important question, because I do not want to leave the impression that's it for all of our programs. Indeed, we just completed a

Veterans Affairs committee  We find it better to give that thorough understanding of the illness and the injury when it comes to VAC.