Veterans Affairs committee  I apologize. Our forecast is for about 9,500 in the backlog. Those are beyond our 16-week service standard in November of this year. We expect to get to about 5,000 by the end of this fiscal year. In other words, that will be at the end of March 2023.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's correct. The benefit that we have right now is we have a large number and complement of trained staff who were working as of day one on April 1, 2022, to continue the work of reducing the backlog. As the minister noted, we've cut the backlog number in half in the last lit

Veterans Affairs committee  I can give you an exact figure on that. For 2021-22, the fiscal year that just ended, the number of applications that were completed within the 16-week service standard was 54%. That's up from 36% the year before, so it's up about 18% from the year previous. Again, that reflects

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you, Mr. Ledwell. I'm going to try to answer the question quickly. A little earlier, Mr. Desilets, you asked questions about the francophone employees who were hired to help us reduce wait times. I first want to confirm that we are going to be keeping those employees. Se

Veterans Affairs committee  I don't mean to pass this as well, but actually Ms. Meunier would be best positioned to give you an answer.

Veterans Affairs committee  Thank you again for the question. Maybe I can provide a bit of an answer. The case manager and the veterans service agent actually work together. People who are in a case management situation are usually going through a rehabilitation program. That—

Veterans Affairs committee  They do work together. It is a continuum of care with respect to how Veterans Affairs manages it. When a veteran is going through a rehabilitation program, they are assigned a case manager. As the veteran completes the rehabilitation program, in other words, achieves the goals

Veterans Affairs committee  Sure, absolutely.

Veterans Affairs committee  No, there is no bonus. There's a bit of a mix in terms of what you're asking, in terms of rehabilitation service contracts with some specialists who help above and beyond the rehabilitation and the discussions that happen with the case manager.

Veterans Affairs committee  For the first applications that came in last year, the average turnaround time was 38 weeks.

Veterans Affairs committee  Of the 3,600 employees, there are 476 caseworkers. The caseworkers don't work on the disability adjudication claims, though.

Veterans Affairs committee  Again, you're somewhat mixing two different elements. We have about 15,000 veterans who are undergoing a rehabilitation program. They're served by case managers. They're served by the 476 case managers. Of the 11,000 files that are in backlog, we have a separate unit that is re

Veterans Affairs committee  According to our service standard, it's clearly not a reasonable amount of time. That's why the government has invested additional resources to be able to help us process those in the backlog, reduce the backlog, which we've been able to do by about 50% over the course of the las

Veterans Affairs committee  That is our published service standard, yes.

Veterans Affairs committee  The minister and the deputy spoke about this in the first hour, with the additional hiring. The $140 million that we were speaking about earlier is to hire additional disability adjudication processing staff. Over the course of the next two years and the past two years, we will h