Thanks, Mr. Chair.
Thank you for your testimony. I think you did a really great job of highlighting how catastrophic this will be for veterans.
I may have missed it in your opening, but one of the things that's really important for people to know, if they're listening to this, is that in almost 90% of the cases that go before the Veterans Review and Appeal Board, where the BPA is advocating for veterans, they end up getting a positive result. In other words, they get a better result than they had originally; or, in many cases, they're getting the benefits or services that they were originally denied. In the case that you mentioned, this means 300 hearings being cancelled in April. That amounts to 270 veterans, roughly, who will not receive benefits and services that they would have received otherwise that month. If you extrapolate that out over the course of a year, it amounts to over 3,000 veterans who would still be waiting or would perhaps be denied services or benefits.
Because you've laid out so clearly why this is important, why these people are needed and what drastic effects these cuts will have, I wondered if you could maybe just give us a bit of a sense of whether you, as the head of the union, were consulted by the minister. Did the minister have a conversation with you before these cuts were announced?