Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you again to our witnesses today.
I want to start off acknowledging, of course, that you're right in the sense that I think on the whole the IRB does a great job. The IRB members are important gatekeepers and ensure that the integrity of our system is effective. Notwithstanding that, you're faced with a major budget crunch. Even with budget 2018 and a lift of $74 million for the IRB, it still means that there's going to be a huge impact with respect to legacy cases.
We learned yesterday from the minister's office that this budget only deals with about 18,000 cases a year, that you're accumulating 2,100 cases per month, and that you have an existing backlog of over 40,000 cases, so it doesn't even deal with half the backlog that's there. But that's not what we're here to study today, because that's not what this study is about, even though it would have been good if we'd had a chance to get into those issues.
That said, on the complaint issue, I am still wondering why it is that the IRB, in your remaking of the process, given the problems that surfaced with the complaint process, opted not to go all the way with a completely independent process. The truth of the matter is that you have an office of integrity. That is true, and it is at arm's length, but all of those decisions still have to go back to the chair. On the issues of whether a complaint is investigated, the findings are accepted, and what disciplinary actions are accepted and taken, all of that still has to go back to the chair of the IRB.
This was one key recommendation that stakeholders, through the consultation process, told you needed to be done. Why did that not become an accepted recommendation and a practice?