I think the chairman covered a large amount of the information in this deck in his presentation, so I will try not to take too much time going through it.
Basically, it just tells a little bit about who we are and what we do and gives a bit more detail about the board process internally.
As the chairman indicated, our mandate is quite straightforward. We provide clients with a full opportunity to request review and appeal hearings and we ensure a fair adjudicative process for the disability pension and award programs, as well as for some war veterans allowance claims.
We are quasi-judicial and independent, and we have full and exclusive jurisdiction to deal with both these programs in terms of redress. We are non-adversarial. In other words, at our hearings you will find only the board members and the representative and the client. There is no one on the other side representing, for example, the department's decision.
Our headquarters is in Charlottetown, where we have around 80 staff and approximately half of our members. Our staff are focused primarily on service delivery. We have an excellent partnership with Veterans Affairs for all our corporate services. That works quite well, and we're very appreciative of that.
We do have our own legal adviser, our own training, our own operational support for our members, and our own research and quality assurance functions. Some of our members are deployed. We do not have offices across the country, but we do have approximately 50% of our members located in major centres across the country.
We have some information on the appointment process. Would you like me to go through that, Chairman?