The nature of that training is such that we have four lines of business in four divisions, and the training curriculum is tailored to the basic lines of business of each of those four divisions. What's common to all of them is a recognition that the people who are appearing in front of the IRB are immigrants and refugees who come from different backgrounds. A great deal of emphasis is placed on the question of recognition of cultural difference, appreciation of diversity, and understanding that the decision-maker's own experience may not be that of the person who appears in front of them.
A lot of the training in that regard is woven into the curriculum specifically in areas dealing with things like credibility assessment. We attune members to how they assess the credibility of someone who comes from a different background from them. We attune them to the fact that many of the people who appear before them have been persecuted and tortured, and suffer psychological trauma as a result.
One point I would like to highlight is that we issued guidelines in May 2017 involving sexual orientation and gender identity and expression. These guidelines were specifically aimed at setting out standards by which board members can deal with refugee claims mostly, but also other types of cases, when an issue before the board member concerns a different sexual orientation or the manner in which a person expresses their gender identity. If you look at those guidelines—and I think we've undertaken to provide them to the committee—they outline some of the ways in which members should ask those very difficult questions while doing so in a respectful manner. Every decision-maker on the board was trained on that issue. We had two separate half-day sessions in the summer of 2017, one dealing with the legal component, and the other dealing with the practical skills of questioning and how you deal with people in certain situations.