Veterans Affairs committee  Good afternoon, Mr. Chair—or good evening, almost, now—and members of the committee. Thank you for the invitation to be with you today. Good evening. Mr. Chair and committee members, I'm happy to be here today. It's been almost a year since the COVID pandemic started in the Ca

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you, and thanks for the question. I can name a few for you offhand, but I won't be able to go through the entire list. The digitization of the approach for hearing loss, which I spoke of earlier, and putting in an innovative tool to be able to get through it much more quic

Veterans Affairs committee  It's everybody who would be involved in making a decision. It's the intake officers, the people who work on pay to ultimately pay out a file, the people who work as benefits program officers and a nurse adjudicator for a medical reference. It's everybody who might be involved in

Veterans Affairs committee  The legislation requires us to go through the stages of the adjudication piece, so we must make the service attribution and the assessment related to that. There is not an opportunity at this stage to make any kind of pre-approval, according to our legislation.

Veterans Affairs committee  I'm not aware of that information either.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's exactly it. A medical assessment doesn't necessarily need to accompany the application when it comes in. Even during this period of time, when somebody might not be able to access a physician to get some kind of diagnosis, they are still able to apply. We do still encourag

Veterans Affairs committee  Thanks. What we have seen is that the number of applications from women veterans over the course of the last little while is a little bit above what we would see normally from their representation in the Canadian Armed Forces. About 16% of the applications with us at the moment

Veterans Affairs committee  I can identify that 7% of the over 300 employees that we've hired so far have Canadian Armed Forces experience. We went back and looked through the applications. There is a self-declaration piece, and some Canadian Armed Forces members choose not to self-declare as a veteran work

Veterans Affairs committee  You're quite right, Deputy. About 75% since April 1 have been coming in as a digital application or through My VAC Account and the online process that we put there, through guided web forms that help veterans walk through each step of that process and make sure they fill in all t

Veterans Affairs committee  It has also been an opportunity for us to revamp our training approach, particularly the disability adjudication piece. Normally, if hiring this many people, we'd have people come in and do classroom training. We've been able to make that transfer over to a digital environment wh

Veterans Affairs committee  We have a number of documents, including the public plan, which doesn't specifically reference individual numbers from that perspective. What we have looked at is expecting to make about 80,000 additional decisions over the course of the next year and a half. We can certainly sha

Veterans Affairs committee  I'm happy to answer that. We expect that the additional resources we've put in place and the action plan we have will get us under 5,000—those files that have been in the system longer than the service standard of 16 weeks—by the end of March 2022. The differences between the PBO

Veterans Affairs committee  I think the deputy is quite right. In addition to the folks we just identified whom we're bringing on, there are 168 individuals from budget 2018 whom we've been able to keep. These folks are fully trained. They've been working since the start of this fiscal year to continue to m

Veterans Affairs committee  Actually, it's just under 19,000.

Veterans Affairs committee  I'll give you the example that we used, the veteran benefit teams. We piloted the veteran benefit teams approach. Again, that's bringing everybody together to make sure we have a full team to make a decision on a file without actually leaving.... Based on our pilot, we think that