Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Harris, thank you for that. Let me very quickly try to address both your questions.
First, regarding the grievance backlog, we have been working on that. One of the most challenging areas of grievance is compensation and benefits. It turns out that no one's upset if they come away with a little more money than they were expecting, but everyone's upset if they come away with a little less. The instance of grievance for compensation and benefits is very high.
I don't question the motivation or the legitimacy of the grievances, but there are an awful lot of them that go through the grievance system, many of which have policy implications. Each case is looked at very carefully for those policy implications, and there's a bottleneck there. We've put extra resources in to try to resolve the bottleneck, but moving forward is still a challenge.
We're addressing it by changing the way we address grievances by looking at different dispute resolution options for people, and by addressing them early and at lower levels, so that we elevate to higher levels only those things that require that level of policy attention and scrutiny. But I admit, sir, that we continue to work on this and we do need to get better at it.
Second, I think you would agree that if the Chief of the Defence Staff is going to agree with a grievance, the more expeditiously that can be done the better. In many cases, a delegated authority can come to that conclusion faster than the Chief of the Defence Staff can actually go through given the volume. We could pare it down to having the chief invest his time in the more challenging grievances that touch on the questions of the institution or the specific well-being of men and women in uniform and responding to the grievance board in those instances.
I hope I've touched on it.