Thank you, Mr. Chair.
To the honourable member's question, certainly we've discussed, as mentioned in the previous testimony as well.... In the 18-month start-up period there was significant collaboration with the government to ensure that we were working through a lot of the deliverables and being ready for the July 1 date.
Resource discussions were not a significant part of that discussion, although we had done our own estimates, based off of many of the historical points of data that were provided within the request for proposal from the previous contractor.
As noted several times, the complexity of the change and the quantity of changes that happened at the July 1 transition date did lead, unfortunately, to a number of calls and service issues that were unforeseeable. It was the addition of all of those changes together that created these unforeseeable challenges.
Regardless of that, we acted quickly and in collaboration with the government to enact our customer service action plan. To that, we have increased our call centre agents and increased our claims examiners.
Certainly we know that people are frustrated in the individual circumstances cited there. They do not meet the service standards that we would expect. However, our customer service action plan is working now and we are able to take calls with one to three minutes. We are committed to processing every eligible claim within the two-day period that we have now.