Thank you.
The definition of a backlog would be an interesting one, I think, for everybody to know. We have over 3,000 cases carried forward from the previous year. Right now we are handling and managing all of those cases. A great majority of the cases will be settled or will be scheduled very briefly. If you're hearing of a backlog at the board, I think it would be more accurate to look at what we are experiencing right now as regular management of our files, in that what is coming in and going out is within the norm and is not adding to....
We are successful in scheduling cases for termination, for example, within four months. We will endeavour to schedule all other cases within five months. So at this point what is happening is that the resources on both sides—the two parties, the bargaining agent and the employer side—are short, and we have requests for postponements due to that.
In response to that, we are trying to innovate and provide both parties with new procedures. We've developed the expedited adjudication process. We are regularly using pre-hearing conferences in order to have the parties maybe narrow the number of days they may need, and those sorts of things, and to try to get a date from them to see when we can proceed.
So we're being very active in this regard, and we don't feel that we're overwhelmed at all. As I said, the numbers are stable and we're managing all of those files.