OTTAWA — Veterans Affairs has been on a hiring spree this week, but the minister in charge says it's not a signal that the Conservative government believes cuts to the bureaucracy went too far.
The department is expecting to recruit 100 case managers, and possibly more, to oversee a declining population of ex-soldiers that have increasingly complex and far-reaching needs.
In meetings with advocacy groups earlier this week, O'Toole said an additional 100 staff would be brought on to process disability claims — a response to an audit last fall that found it was taking up to eight months to process some cases.
The positions will be a mixture of permanent and temporary in a branch that suffered a disproportionate amount of the department's staff reductions.
In an interview with The Canadian Press, O'Toole says the decision acknowledges the auditor general's criticism that Veterans Affairs wasn't meeting service goals.
He also says there has been a much more dramatic increase in mental health claims than the government had anticipated.
