There still is a lack of clarity in terms of the line on the roles and responsibilities between National Defence and the office of the ombudsman. This issue is important because the ombudsman's office needs to have the independence to conduct its investigations. The investigations that it's doing are about complaints that members of the military, or their families, or civilian employees of National Defence have about the operations of the military or National Defence. The ombudsman's office is the way that those employees have to get their concerns dealt with, so the ombudsman's office needs to have independence to conduct those investigations.
On the other hand, all of the staff and the budget for the ombudsman's office come from National Defence, so National Defence has a responsibility to make sure that the hiring rules are respected, that the financial management rules are respected, and that values and ethics are respected. They have to do monitoring of the ombudsman's office to make sure those administrative rules and roles function properly.
You can see that, almost by definition, there's a push-pull between those two things, where National Defence has to monitor the ombudsman's office, but the ombudsman's office has to do independent inquiries into National Defence's activities.
We certainly did find that the problems were at their worst between 2009 and 2012. There were some actions that were taken in the latter part of 2012 into 2013 to try to resolve the issues. The investigations started to be completed on a more timely basis again, but there still are some places where the roles and responsibilities are not totally defined. It's important to make sure that the inquiries can be done independently but that there can also be appropriate oversight of the management and administration of the ombudsman's office.