Eight years after the Veterans Hiring Act was passed, the Department of Veterans Affairs yesterday said it had no figures on how many veterans were actually hired. “We absolutely believe in hiring veterans,” Steven Harris, assistant deputy minister, testified at the Commons veterans affairs committee, according to Blacklock's Reporter..“We know veterans can struggle with adapting to the civilian workplace,” said Harris. “We’re developing tools,” he added. “We do make efforts, listening to employers as part of our strategy.”.“Would you have an overall number of employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs who are veterans themselves?” asked Conservative MP Blake Richards (Banff-Airdrie, AB). “I don’t have a specific number for you,” replied Assistant Deputy Harris..“Practice what you preach,” said Richards. “If we want to see more veterans employed it seems to me like the Department of Veterans Affairs would be a great place to start.”.Richards cited figures from 2019 indicating the department had few ex-military on the payroll. “It was 167 out of 3,198 employees or about 5.2%,” said Richards. “If you can’t say you are leading by example it makes it that much more difficult, obviously.”.The department said an average 8,500 former soldiers, sailors and air crew leave the Canadian Armed Forces each year. “From this, approximately 4,000 to 4,500 seek second careers,” said Assistant Deputy Harris. The number of medically-released veterans averages 2,500 a year according to a 2019 report of the Commons government operations committee Veterans: A Valuable Resource For The Federal Public Service..Parliament in 2015 passed Bill C-27 An Act To Amend The Public Service Employment Act. The bill nicknamed the Veterans Hiring Act mandated preferential federal hiring of ex-military honourably discharged for “medical reasons due to service.” The average age of medically discharged veterans at the time was 37..Public Service Commission surveys showed despite the passage of Bill C-27 fewer than half of 1% of new federal employees hired annually were medically-released veterans. Lt.-Gen. (Ret’d) Steve Hutt, federal director of transition services for veterans, yesterday testified the department was still working on solutions..“We are just in the midst of formulating a strategy,” said Hutt. “It’s the very early stages. We are really analyzing the problem. But things that we do know is that we do have to do things to improve the public service hiring mechanisms, the processes and really the outcome being more veterans in the public service.”.Richards described inaction as frustrating. “The vast majority of medically-released veterans are saying they are not happy with the access they have to programs and services to assist them with that transition,” he said..“I’m getting a little frustrated because I keep hearing, ‘We’re going to work on this to try and get better,’ ‘We’re going to do this to try and be better,’” said Richards. “This isn’t a new problem.”
