Question to the Minister of Veterans Affairs – Federally Funded Infrastructure Projects and the Hiring of Veterans

Thank you, minister, for joining us. As you can see, this is a most interesting place. You should come more often.

My query goes to an objective in your mandate letter relating to the improvement of career and vocational counselling for returning veterans and the opening up of opportunities for them in federally funded infrastructure projects, roughly $186 billion. There will be lots of jobs for lots of people, hopefully for our veterans, too.

In my experience, targets matter. What gets measured gets done. Have you set hiring targets for federally funded infrastructure projects and the hiring of veterans? What are these targets? Can you share them with us? What is your progress to date against these targets?

Hon. Kent Hehr, P.C., M.P. Minister of Veterans Affairs and Associate Minister of National Defence: Thank you very much for the question. There’s no doubt that we want to assure that veterans and their families have opportunities to build their lives following their military service.

I can say that Budget 2017 brought in many things that will help address the issues you’re discussing. We brought in an education benefit that will see a soldier after they’ve completed six years of military service be able to get $40,000 to be able to go to post-secondary; after 12 years, $80,000 to go to post-secondary.

We’ve also developed a plan where if people don’t want to go back to school, if they’re looking for a career opportunity through a real estate license or go back to dog grooming or some unique opportunity like that, they can have access to a $5,000 professional training course that can allow for more jobs and better outcomes. So we’re reacting to this.

We’ve also done career training to allow for job coaching as well as placement that will help people get jobs both in the public sector, so they understand the Veterans Hiring Act and how we prioritize that, as well as finding jobs in the private sector.

But if you look at your specific question with respect to us doing a better job of getting veterans’ jobs within my department and otherwise, yes, we’ve hired a priority secretary to allow us, underneath that, to have a veterans hiring unit where we accept resumés. People have come into our department — in fact the whole of government — and we have been able to help them get positions within the public sector. We just implemented that in the last year, so we’re really hoping to have good results.

I’ve also directed a letter to all of my cabinet colleagues asking them to bring a greater focus on hiring veterans. As well, my Deputy Minister Walt Natynczyk has directed a letter to other deputy ministers encouraging them to do the same. We’re taking a whole-of-government approach to the issue that you just brought up.