Government will hire more staff to address veterans’ backlog
OTTAWA — The federal Liberal government is promising to hire more staff to tackle a backlog of requests for assistance and shortage of case managers that is leaving many disabled veterans without the help they need.
Veterans Affairs Minister Lawrence Macaulay made the commitment in an interview after The Canadian Press published a series of articles in the lead-up to Remembrance Day that looked at some of the most pressing challenges facing veterans today.
Those challenges included the backlog of disability applications that is leaving thousands of veterans waiting months and sometimes years for treatment and financial support, and which veterans’ organizations have been identified as the community’s top concern.
The series also looked at the overwhelming number of veterans assigned to individual case managers, and how those caseloads are threatening to let some of the most severely injured fall through the cracks.
“We’re going to hire more,” Macaulay said. “Our party and government have indicated quite clearly we’re going to hire more adjudicators and case managers. The biggest priority in Veterans Affairs Canada is to deal with this backlog. And that’s what we’re going to do.”
Yet while the minister underscored adding staff, as the Liberals also promised during the recent election, will form a key part of the government’s response, he would not say how many people would be hired or when.
“I’m not going to give you an exact date on anything,” Macaulay said. “But what I’m going to do is make sure that we continue to deal with the backlog and bring that percentage down.”
The Canadian Press series also looked at the lack of a promised strategy from the government for veterans’ homelessness, calls for more assistance to the families of injured veterans, and the fight some are waging for equal treatment from Ottawa.