I think that's me, Mr. Chair.
As mentioned, pre-1999, there are no electronic records. In a lot of cases there are actually no paper records that exist. To verify the validation of records, members would send in their pay records and we would gather archived pay slips. Back then they actually called them pay cards as well.
If they couldn't find those, we'd accept course attendance records. A lot of members had to go to CFB Borden for six-month courses, and that type of thing. Therefore, we could prove they were a second lieutenant from 1962 to 1963 and so on. As a fail-safe measure, if they were confident they had military service, we would accept a T4 from the CRA to fill in the missing gaps. The problem with a T4 is that it doesn't say at what rank and how many hours you served. It simply says how much you earned. From that, we can work backwards. If they were a second lieutenant and thought they had worked six months, we could figure out how many hours they did work.
It is up to my staff to assist the member and verify that all their records are there. They sign off that, yes, it is complete, and then from there we process the files.